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Author A7 3?a w
Title
This book should be returned on or before the date last marked below.
KARL MARX:
MAN AND FIGHTER
by
BORIS NICOLAIEVSKY
and
OTTO MAENCHEN-HELFEN
Translated by Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher
METHUEN & CO. LTD. LONDON
36 Essex Street W.C.2
First published in any language in rgg6
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
FOREWORD
Strife has raged about Karl Marx for decades, and never
has it been so embittered as at the present day. .He has
impressed his image on the time as no other man has done.
To some he is a fiend, the arch-enemy of human civilisation,
and the prince of chaos, while to others he is a far-seeing and
beloved leader, guiding the human race towards a brighter
future. In Russia his teachings are the official doctrines of
the state, while Fascist countries wish them exterminated. In
the areas under the sway of the Chinese Soviets Marx’s portrait
appears upon the bank-notes, while in Germany they have
burned his books. Practically all the parties of the Socialist
Workers’ International, and the Communist parties in all
countries, acknowledge Marxism, the eradication of which is
the sole purpose of innumerable political leagues, associations
and coalitions.
The French Proudhonists of the sixties, the followers of
Lassalle in Germany of the seventies, the Fabians m England
before the War produced their own brand of Socialism which
they opposed to that of Marx. The anti- Marxism of to-day
has nothing in common with those movements. He who
opposes Marxism to-day does not do so because, for instance,
he denies the validity of Marx’s theory of the tendency of the
rate of profit to fall. Similarly there are millions to-day who
acknowledge Marx as their leader, but not because he solved
the riddle of capitalist society. Per ha ps one Socialist in a
thousand has ever read any of .Marx’s economic writings, and
of a thousand anti- Marxi s ts not even one . The strife no longer
rages round the truth or Talsetiood of the doctrine of historical
materialism or the validity of the labour theory of value or
the theory of marginal utility. These things are discussed
and also not discussed. The arena in which Marx is fought
about to-day is in the factories, in the parliaments and at the
barricades. In both camps, the bourgeois and the Socialist,
Marx is first of all, if not exclusively, the revolutyy^xv.
Vi KARL MARX: MA& AND FBGHTER
the leader of the proletariat in its struggle to overthrow
Capitalism.
This book is intended to describe the life of Marx the fighter.
We make no attempt to disguise the difficulties of such an
undertaking. Marxism — to use the word in its proper sense,
embracing the whole of Marx’s work — is a whole. To div ide
theory from practice was completely a li en to Marx’s nature.
How, th en, can his life b e understood excegt as a unity oi
thought and action? ^
‘The man of science was not even half the man,’ Engels said
in his speech at the grave-side of his dead friend. ‘For Marx
science was an historically moving, revolutionary force. Marx
was above all a revolutionary. To co-operate in one way or
another in the work of bringing about the downfall of capitalist
society and the state institutions which were its creations, to
co-operate in the liberation of the modern proletariat, to make
it conscious of its situation and its needs, and conscious of
the conditions for its own emancipation — that was his real
life-work.’
Marx was a Socialist before he reached real and complete
understanding of the laws of development underlying bourgeois
society. When he wrote the Communist Manifesto at the age
of thirty he did not yet appreciate the many different forms
which surplus value could assume, but the Communist Mani-
festo contained the whole doctrine of the class- war and showed
the proletariat the historical task that itiiad to fulfil. We have
written the biography of Marx as the strategist of the class-
struggle. The discoveries made by Marx in the course of his
explorations of the anatomy of bourgeois society will only be
mentioned in so far as they directly concern our subject. But
the word ‘directly’ need not be taken too literally. A complete
picture of JMarx’s economic doctrines would not be consistent
with our theme, which was dictated to us by the time in which
we live.
To some periods of Marx’s life we have given far more space
.than others. In writing his biography our standard was not
mere length of time but the importance of events in Marx’s
life. Once ? when Marx was asked what his idea of happiness
was, his answer was ‘to fight.’ The years of revolution in
d those of the First International are two or three
FOREWORD
Vll
times as important as the rest. We do not believe we have left
out anything of importance. To the important things we have
given the space that they deserve.
Many new documents have been discovered since the end
of the Great War. They put many things in a new light and
reveal links and connections the very existence of which was
not suspected before. To mention all the sources we have
used would take up too much space. Suffice it to say that
apart from printed material — incidentally we discovered a
great deal of hitherto unsuspected material from old news-
papers and periodicals — we have succeeded in extracting
a great deal of new matter from archives. In particular the
archives of the German Social Democratic Party, which contain
the manuscripts of Marx and Engels left at their death, as well
as those of many of their contemporaries and fellow-fighters,
and a vast number of documents relating to the history of
the First International were put at our disposal. They re-
mained at our disposal even in the present difficult circum-
stances, when they have been taken abroad, and for this
we have to thank the Party leaders (at present in Prague).
We found a great deal of material in the secret state
archives at Berlin-Dahlem and in the Saxon state archives at
Dresden.
We were also enabled to use some documents from the
archives of the British Foreign Office, preserved in the Record
Office, more particularly documents regarding the attempt
made by the Prussian Government to secure Marx’s expulsion
from England in 1850. We wish to express our thanks to
Mr. E. H. Carr, who drew our attention to these documents
and sent us copies.
We have intentionally quoted a great deal. We obviously
could not recoin phrases coined by Marx which^have long
become familiar in our everyday speech. We have quoted
Marx himself wherever the subject demanded it, and f often
let him speak for himself, because the particular turn he gave
his thoughts, the way he fitted his sentences together, tha
adjectives he chose, reveal the nature of the man more clearly
than any analysis. For the same reasons we have quoted his
contemporaries whenever possible. Half the contents of a
police agent’s report is the way he writes it. To qu<JI&
Vlll
KARL MARX.* MAN AND FlrGHTER
of Bakunin’s without using his own words in the important
passages would be to misrepresent him. The fact that we
give the source of our quotations will be welcome to many
readers.
June 1936^
B. Nicolaievsky _
Otto Maenchen-Helfen
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. ORIGINS AND CHILDHOOD ....
II. A HAPPY YEAR AT BONN ....
III. JENNY VON WESTPHALEN ....
IV. STUDENT YEARS IN BERLIN ....
V. PHILOSOPHY UNDER CENSORSHIP .
VI. THE GERMANS LEARN FRENCH
VII. THE COMMUNIST ARTISANS OF PARIS
VIII. THE LIFE-LONG FRIEND ....
IX. CLARIFICATION ......
X. FACE TO FACE WITH PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM .
XI. THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE ....
XII. THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPEST
XIII. THE S MAD YEAR’ IN COLOGNE
XIV. DEFEAT WITH HONOUR ....
XV. THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE .
XVI. THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE .
XVII. THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING MEN’S ASSOCIATION
XVIII. MICHAEL BAKUNIN .....
XIX. THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR ....
XX. THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL
XXI. THE LAST TEN YEARS
INDEX
PAGE
I
*5
21
29
43
61
75
86
99
107
122
138
155
178
i99
227
261
280
298
333
368
383
FRONTISPIECE
KARL MARX. A drawing from life
(. Photograph supplied by Exclusive News Agency )
IX
KARL MARX:
MAN AND FIGHTER
CHAPTER I
ORIGINS AND CHILDHOOD
Trier deservedly enjoys the reputation of being the oldest
town in Germany. Its origins are lost in the mists of antiquity.
A metropolis under the Roman Empire, it was brought to ruin
in the stormy times of the migration of the peoples, but rose
and flourished again in' the Middle Ages under the mild sway
of its bishops, whose diocese extended to Metz, Toul and
Verdun. Its position at the extreme edge of German-speaking
territory made of it an intermediary between German culture
and French. It changed its overlords more than once. It
belonged to the German Holy Roman Empire, then to the
Kingdom of France, then it became German once again. After
the outbreak of the French Revolution a stream of French
Smigres poured into Trier as into other frontier towns, and for
some years it was the outpost of the Coblenz Reaction. The
White detachments were formed in Trier, where conspiracies
were hatched and emissaries forgathered going into or coming
out of France.
In the autumn of 1793, just a quarter of a century before
the birth of Marx, when the Allies were retreating to the Rhine
before the armies of the Revolution, Goethe came to Trier
with the Duke of Weimar’s troops. ‘The town has one striking
characteristic,’ he wrote in his French Campaign. ‘It claims that
it possesses more religious buildings than any other place of
the same size. Its reputation in this respect could scarcely
be denied. For within its walls it is burdened, nay oppressed,
with churches and chapels and cloisters and colleges and
buildings dedicated to chivalrous and religious orders, to say
nothing of the abbacies, Carthusian convents and institutions
which invest, nay blockade, it.’
The waves of the Reformation never reached Trier, and the
political and economic power of the Church remained un-
broken. For all that its clerical Electors did a good deal for
culture and for art. The last, Clement Wenceslaus, who was
forced ^o flee before the victorious troops of the Gonyep^Va
2
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
in 1 794, was a liberal-minded man and his prebendary, Dalberg,
a vigorous patron of public instruction, belonged to the order of
the Illuminati.
Nevertheless the inhabitants of Trier received the French
with enthusiasm. The Revolution released the peasants from the
trammels of feudalism, gave the bourgeoisie the administra-
tive and legal apparatus they required for their advancement,
freed the intelligentsia from the tutelage of the priests. The
men of Trier danced round their ‘tree of freedom 5 just like the
inhabitants of Mainz. They had their own Jacobin club.
Many a respected citizen in the thirties still looked back with
pride to his Jacobin past.
Trier remained French for two decades. But as the novelty
wore off the things wrought by the Revolution — the dividing-up
of Church property in particular — and as the burdens that
came in its train increased, the first revolutionary ardour
faded, and indifference grew. In the last years of the Napo-
leonic Empire indifference was replaced by open hostility.
Every year the taxes grew more oppressive. The sons of the
artisans of Trier and the peasants of the Moselle bled to death
on the battlefields of Spain, Germany and Russia. In January,
1815, Trier greeted the Allies as deliverers from an intolerable
yoke.
The Congress of Vienna awarded Trier to Prussia. The
Prussian Government appreciated the necessity of handling
its new- won territory with care. It* zealously avoided coming
into conflict with the Catholic Church and kept on its guard
against injuring the religious susceptibilities of its newly
acquired subjects. But it refrained from laying hands on the
possessions of those who had grown rich by the acquisition
of Church property during the Revolution. In all its essentials
the Code Napoleon , the French statute-book, remained in force
as far as fhe Rhineland was concerned. Public and oral court
proceedings were retained. The pick of Prussian officialdom
was sent to the Rhineland provinces, charged with the duty of
scrupulously respecting local idiosyncrasies. For a number of
years the Rhineland was sheltered from the full ultra-reactionary
blast which set in everywhere else in Prussia immediately after
the conclusion of peace.
* Tl|p XJovernment, tolerant to the Catholic masses, took pains
ORIGINS AND CHILDHOOD
3
to win over the intelligentsia too. It did a great deal, among
other things, for archaeological research. The inhabitants of
Trier were proud of the wealth of Roman remains in their
town. Scarcely a doctor, lawyer or schoolmaster but was also
an historian and archaeologist. The Government provided
ample sums of money to subsidise their researches. Instead of
agitating against Prussian absolutism, ex-Jacobins burrowed
for Mithraic altars and gravestones. In those years the Trier
of antiquity, Augusta Treverorum , rose once more from its ruins.
The culture of the vine, mainspring then as now of the
agricultural economy of the Moselle, flourished mightily,
thanks to the tariff which came into force in 1 8 1 8. High, almost
prohibitive duties closed the Prussian market to foreign wines
and provided the peasants of the Moselle with a vast and assured
outlet for their produce.
Among those who received the Prussians with the greatest
enthusiasm were the Rhineland Jews. In 1815 the economic
position of the Jews was incomparably more favourable in the
kingdom of Prussia than in most of the departments of France.
The Prussian Decree of March n, 1812, gave them rights
that they had enjoyed for only a few years under Napoleon;
for practically everything that the Revolution had given them
was taken away by the * decret infame ’ of March 17, 1808.
Extensive restrictions were placed upon their liberty of move-
ment, and their freedom to trade or earn a living as they wished
was as good as abolished. The Jews, at any rate economically,
were cast back into the ghetto which they had been preparing
to leave. And now the yoke they groaned under was heavier
than before. Hitherto the Rhineland Jews had been money-
lenders, insisting rigorously upon their bond. But Napoleon
compelled them to usury that was secret and obscure. The
decree was to last in the first instance for ten years, until 1818.
But in 1815 Napoleon fell, and the Jews expected that with
him his decree would fall too.
They were disappointed. Article Sixteen of the statutes of
the new, German Federation of Princes specified that legal
rights everywhere should remain as they had been before.
Prussia, glad at being able to drop the Liberal mask she
had been forced to adopt in the War of Liberation, entered
unabashed upon Napoleon’s inheritance in so far as jt> w^s
4 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
sufficiently reactionary for her. There was no need whatever
to have any consideration for the Jews. So she piled Pelion
upon Ossa and superimposed her Old Prussian special Jewish
regulations upon those of Napoleon. Under the French
Empire it had been possible in exceptional cases for Jews to
enter the service of the State; in Prussia, even after the so-
called emancipation, it was impossible under any circumstances.
So the Rhineland Jews who had entered the State service under
Napoleon were compelled to leave it as soon as Frederick
William III became their overlord.
The number of those affected was only three, and one of
them was a Trier lawyer, Hirschel Marx, the father of KarL
The chairman of the commission which carried out the transfer
from French to Prussian authority described him as a ‘learned,
very industrious and thoroughly conscientious man’ and
warmly recommended him to be taken over into the Prussian
service, but this helped him not at all. In June, 181 5, he wrote
a memorial in which he expressed his confidence in Prussian
justice in moving terms, but he did not receive so much as
a reply. Confronted with the choice of changing his faith
or his occupation, he had himself baptised and adopted the
name of Heinrich.
To abandon the Jewish faith was no great wrench. He
did object to the coercion. He was incensed by the narrow
intolerance that forced him to this step. No ties bound him
to the synagogue, or, for that matter to the church either.
True, his ancestors, on his father’s and his mother’s side alike,
had been rabbis as far back as his family-t^ee can be traced.
Hirschel’s father, Marx Levy, later known as Marx only, who
died in 1798, was a Trier rabbi. The family-tree of Hirschel’s
mother, Eva Moses Lvov (1753-1823) included a number of
celebrated rabbis, including Meir Katzenellenbogen, head of
the Talmud School at Padua, who died in 1565, Joseph Ben
Gerson ha-Cohen, who died in 1591, and the honoured
teacher, Josua Heschel Lvov (1693-1771). The family lived
in Hessia, later emigrated to Poland (Lvov is the Polish name
for Lemberg) and had been settled in Trier since the seven-
teenth century. The eldest of Levy’s three sons, Samuel,
became a rabbi like his fathers before him. He died in Trier
ifc-j8&7in his fiftieth year.
ORIGINS AND CHILDHOOD 5
Hirschel Marx was born at Saarlouis in 1782. The scanty
indications available point to his having early cut himself
adrift from his hereditary environment. In a letter to his son
he once wrote that but for his existence itself he had received
nothing from his family, ‘except, to be fair, my mother’s love.’
His writings contain no word to indicate even the faintest
spiritual link with the Jewish faith. Edgar von Westphalen,
who spent many hours of his boyhood in the Marxes’ house,
remembered Heinrich Marx in his old age as a ‘Protestant
d la Lessing.’ A ‘real eighteenth-century Frenchman, who
knew his Voltaire and Rousseau inside out,’ a Kantian like
most of the educated people of his town, professing ‘a pure
belief in God, like Newton, Locke and Leibnitz,’ he had
nothing whatever in common with the world of rabbinic
Jewry. Alienated from his family from his youth up, he had
a stony path to tread. In later years he confessed that his
‘strong principles’ had been his ‘only possession.’
His baptism, which took place between the summer of 1816
and the spring of 1817, cut the last loose tie that bound him
to his family. If he had hoped before to bring light into the
the darkness of the ghetto, in spite of being misunderstood,
suspected and practically alone, henceforward the task was
an impossibility. It was an impossibility not because of his
baptism alone. For had the emancipation of the Jews not
proved illusory? Was not the dream of their becoming equals
among equals over? Now that the door that led from the
ghetto to the outer world was once more shut and bolted,
the Jews of the ghetto retired into themselves more fanatically
than ever. They rejected everything that they had longed
for not so long before. They became hyper-orthodox; every-
thing that was traditionally Jewish was sacrosanct, good and
bad alike.
We do not know how Marx’s father came to terms with it
all. But there is an echo in the unwilling words: ‘The Hebrew
faith is repellent to me,’ that Marx wrote at the age of twenty-
five. What Marx thought in his young years of the Jewry
of his time and country we know from what he wrote in 1844
in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher . ‘Let us not search for
the secret of the Jews in their religion, but for the secret of
their religion in the living Jews,’ he wrote. ‘What .is t^e
6 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
#
worldly foundation of Jewry? Self-interest and the satisfying
of practical wants. What is the worldly worship of the Jews?
Huckstering. What is their worldly god? Money. Very
well. The emancipation from huckstering and money, that is,
from real, practical Jewry, would be the real self-emancipation
of our time.’
On August 24, 1824, Heinrich Marx’s children — Sophie,
Karl, Hermann, Henriette, Louise, Emilie and Karoline —
were received into the national evangelical church. Their
mother, Henriette, waited' till her parents were dead before
being baptised on November 20, 1825. Her maiden name was
Pressburg and she came of a family of Hungarian origin which
had been settled in Holland for generations.
In the pages that follow there will be little to say about
Marx’s mother and his brothers and sisters. His mother was
a devoted housewife, lovingly concerned for the minor things
of life, engrossed in the health, feeding and clothing of her
children, narrow-minded if not actually stupid, without any
understanding for the daemon of her son. She never forgave
him for not becoming a lawyer like his father. She regarded
his activities as suspicious from an early age. Measured by
her dreams about his future, he was a failure, a genius maybe,
but a scapegrace, incompetent, the black sheep of the family,
entirely lacking in sense for the only things that she thought
sensible, that is to say, a quiet, comfortable life in a narrow
circle, respected by the respectable, the well-to-do and the
well-bred. When Marx looked back upon his life at the age
of fifty he still remembered her saying, in the execrable German
that she spoke all her life:
Tf Karl had only made capital instead of . . .’
Not very much is known about Marx’s brothers and sisters.
The first-born, Moriz David, died soon after birth. The next
child was Sophie, born on November 13, 1816. She was,
as far as we know, the only one of Karl’s brothers and sisters
who was at all close to him in his youth. In later years, how-
ever, he scarcely even kept in touch with this sister, who
married a lawyer named Schmalhausen and lived at Maastricht.
Karl was born at half-past one on the morning of May 5, 1818.
Of Karl’s two younger brothers, Hermann died at the age
0$ twenty-three and Eduard at the age of eleven. Both
ORIGINS AND CHILDHOOD 7
succumbed to tuberculosis, the hereditary family disease, as did
two others sisters, Henriette and Karoline. Louise, born in
1821, married Jan Karl Juta, a Dutchman, and settled in
Cape Town with him. She and her husband twice visited
Marx in London, and in 1853 Marx wrote some articles for the
%uid-Afrikaan , which his brother-in-law edited. Emilie, born
in 1822, married an engineer named Conradi and lived in
Trier until her death in 1888.
In 1815, when the Moselle country became Prussian, Hein-
rich Marx was a lawyer attached to the Trier court. In 1820
he was attached to the newly founded Trier provincial court.
Later he acquired the title of Justizrat and was for many years
batonnier du barreau . He occupied a respected position in the
social life of the town. The family lived in a beautiful old
house in the Rhineland baroque style in the Bruckenstrasse,
one of the best parts of the town. Trier was a small place.
In 1818, the year of Marx’s birth, it numbered 11,400 inhabi-
tants, of whom the overwhelming majority were Catholic.
The Protestant community, to which the Marxes now adhered,
consisted of barely three hundred souls, mainly officials trans-
ferred to the Moselle from other provinces. In these circum-
stances the origins of the rabbi’s son did not matter. ‘Here
everyone who conducts himself well is respected/ Ernst von
Schiller, the son of Friedrich Schiller, at that time Landgerichtsrat
at Trier, wrote at the end of 1820.
At the beginning of 1830 Heinrich Marx was the leader of
the moderate constitutional party in Trier. He did not share
the francophilia which was still fairly widespread in the
Rhineland and became accentuated as the Old Prussian
reaction established itself more and more firmly in the new
territories.
‘Only the hybrid Liberals of to-day could idolise a I^apoleon/
he wrote to his son in 1837. ‘I assure you that under him no
one dared even to think aloud the kind of thing that is d # aily
written in Germany to-day, without hindrance or impediment,
in Prussia in particular. He who has studied Napoleon’s
history and his crazy system of ideas may rejoice with a good
conscience at his fall and the victory of Prussia.’ He advised
the composition of an ode which should extol the victory of
the Belle Alliance . The motif he suggested is interesting. ‘Ifri
8
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
failure would have laid humanity, and the intellect especially,
in everlasting chains. 9 Heinrich Marx preferred enlightened
monarchy to military dictatorship, but he was no defender
of absolutism.
As the bureaucratic absolutist Prussian regime increasingly
demonstrated its incompetence, his antipathy to it grew.
Towards the end of the twenties the condition of the peasants
of the Moselle took a turn for the worse. In 1828 Prussia
formed a Customs Union with Hessia, and in 1834 the German
Zollverein was formed. The competition of non-Prussian wine-
growing peasants deprived the Moselle of the hitherto certain
outlet for its produce, and prices rapidly fell, to the accompani-
ment of rising taxes. The pauperisation of the peasants of the
Moselle proceeded at such a rate that within a few years
contemporaries compared their state with the distress of the
weavers of Silesia. Trade slumped, the position of the artisans
went from bad to worse. The Revolution of July, 1830, in
Paris, the setting up of the Bourgeois Kingdom, the September
rising in Brussels and the Belgian Declaration of Independence
made a profound impression in the Rhineland. In Germany
there was unrest in Brunswick, Saxony and Kurhessen. Vin-
tagers from the Moselle area actually took part in the famous
Hambacher Fest held by the Liberals on May 27, 1832.
In the Rhineland the old francophile tendencies underwent
a mighty revival. New, fantastic, shocking and unprecedented
ideas came winging their way across the frontier from France.
Saint-Simonism gained so many adherents on the Moselle that
the archbishop was compelled to issue an rmphatic warning
against the new heresy. In 1835 a pamphlet of Ludwig Gall,
who has been called the first German Socialist, appeared in
'Trier. In it he declared that labour was the source of all
wealth and that millions owned nothing but their power to
work. The pamphlet also contained the following phrases:
‘The privileged, moneyed class and the labouring classes,
sharply divided as they are by diametrically opposing interests,
are in sharp conflict. As the position of the former improves,
so does that of the latter worsen, become more wretched and
distressed. 9 The police were aware of Gall’s ‘very suspicious
way of thinking 9 and perceived that he ‘required a specially
°harp watch to be kept on him. 9
ORIGINS AND CHILDHOOD 9
At first the local State officials scarcely altered their policy.
Better acquainted than the central authorities in Berlin with
conditions in the newly acquired territories, they kept them
in ignorance of oppositional utterances for fear of intensifying
the situation. This went on until events compelled them to
intervene, and in these events Heinrich Marx occupied a
prominent place.
The ‘Literarische Kasino-Gesellschaft,’ a club that dated
back to the time of French suzerainty, was the hub of the social
life of Trier. Differences of social status were of no account
in it. ‘Any upright and educated man, without regard to rank
or occupation/ was eligible for membership. The club
premises consisted of a big, two-storey house, containing a
library, a reading-room, in which the principal French and
German newspapers were kept, a number of social rooms and
a hall in which concerts, theatrical performances and balls
were given. ‘The Society for Practical Research 5 ( Gesellschaft
fur niltzliche Forschung ), which retained strong traditions dating
from the time of its foundation in 1802, met at the club. One
of its joint founders and most active members was Hugo
Wyttenbach, headmaster of Karl Marx’s school.
On January 12, 1834, a banquet was held at the club in
honour of the deputies to the Rhineland Diet, thus associating
the men of Trier with the campaign of banquets which swept
South Germany in the winter of 1833-4 under the battle-cry
of a constitution. In the opinion of the Prussian authorities
this ceremony was quite superfluous; but they did not really
become alarmed about it until they discovered that it was not
intended to honour all the deputies to the Diet but only the
liberal-minded and ‘little commendable’ Valdenaire, Kaiser
and Mohr, while Handel, representative of the Trier nobility,
was omitted. #
Heinrich Marx was one of the organisers of the banquet and
he proposed the toast of the deputies. He paid a globing
tribute to the king ‘to whose magnanimity we are indebted
for the first institutions of popular representation. In the
fullness of his omnipotence he arranged that Diets should
assemble so that truth might arrive at the steps of the throne.’
He concluded with the words: ‘So let us look confidently
forward to a serene future, for irrests in the hands of a worthy
10 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
$
father, an upright king, whose noble heart will always remain
open and well-disposed to the just and reasonable wishes of
his people/
A very loyal speech, to be sure, yet the voice of the opposition
was plainly to be discerned in it. The party of ultra-reaction
in Berlin wanted to have the Rhenish Diet abolished, or at least
have its privileges circumscribed as far as possible. Therefore
praising the king for having sanctioned the Diet was equivalent
to protesting against the royal plan to suppress it. The presi-
dent of the administrative district was forced to abandon his
previous practice and report the matter to Berlin. There could
be no good purpose behind the banquet, which was a small-
scale imitation of similar affairs in the Southern German
States. But it was the only one of its kind in Prussia. The
Trier Press was not allowed to report it, but the newspapers
of Cologne and Coblenz carried detailed descriptive reports
of it, and even the Paris Constitutionnel , the organ of the Left,
announced that the inhabitants of Trier had held a "brilliant
banquet 5 at which "speeches of the most Liberal purport 5 were
delivered. Kamptz, the Minister of Justice, rightly interpreted
the pious words. ‘They imagine themselves not just deputies
to the Diet but representatives of the people, and accordingly
receive the civic crown . 5
Soon afterwards, to crown the intense disapproval with
which the Government regarded the banquet and the speeches
made at it, a new sensation arose. On January 20 the club
anniversary celebrations were held and became exuberant.
The company drank, sang and made merry, ^hey grew over-
bold and started singing not just German songs but French —
the Marseillaise and the Parisienne. An officer reported the
matter. Heinrich Marx was among those who sang and made
depreciatory references to the Prussians. At this the whole
official apparatus was set in motion. The ministry in Berlin
intervened, the Crown Prince, Frederick William, wrote an
indignant letter to the burgomaster, describing the songs that
were sung as ‘heinous, the apotheosis of ancient and modern
perfidy , 5 and a detailed report of the matter was made to the
king himself. Officers and State officials who had been
members of the club resigned and the premises were placed
voider police supervision. From that day on Heinrich Marx
ORIGINS AND CHILDHOOD
II
was regarded by the Government as thoroughly unreliable
politically. Young Karl, then aged sixteen, cannot have failed
to follow these events, in which his father was so closely
concerned, with great attention.
Karl Marx was devoted to his father. His daughter Eleanor
recalled that he never tired of talking about him. ‘He always
carried with him a photograph of his father which was taken
from an old daguerreotype. But he was never willing to show
it to strangers, because, he said, it bore so little resemblance
to the original. To me the face appeared very fine. The
eyes and forehead resembled those of his son, but the part of the
face round the mouth and the chin were gentler. His features
as a whole were of a definitely Jewish, but fine Jewish type.
When Karl Marx started the long, sorrowful journey in search
of health after his wife’s death, this photograph, an old
photograph of my mother on glass and a photograph of my
sister, Jenny, went with him. We found them in his breast-
pocket after his death. Engels laid them in his coffin.’
More detailed knowledge of Marx’s boyhood would be
welcome, but all that has come down to us is a few meagre,
disconnected reminiscences by his sisters. They show him
as an unruly companion at play. He seems to have been a
fearful tyrant. He drove the girls at full gallop down the
Marxberg and insisted on their eating the cakes he made with
his dirty hands out of still dirtier dough. But they put up
with it all without a protest because he told them such mar-
vellous stories in return. His schoolmates loved him and
feared him at the same time — loved him because he was always
up to tricks and feared him because of the ease with which he
wrote satirical verses and lampoons upon his enemies. He
retained this ability during the whole of his life.
Karl Marx was sent to the high grammar schooHn 1830.
He was a moderate pupil. The best pupils were singled out
at the end of each school year. Marx once received an
‘honourable mention’ for ancient and modern languages, but
he was only tenth on the list. Another time he was singled
out for his good performances at German composition. This
was not much for five years at school. He passed his examina-
tions without distinction. There is some evidence to indicate
that he had the reputation, among schoolfellows and masters
12 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
alike, of being a poet. After Karl’s departure to Bonn Uni-
versity, when his father gave Wyttenbach, his old headmaster,
his son’s greetings and told him that Karl intended to write
a poem in his honour, ‘it made the old man happy.’
Whether the poem was ever written is unknown. The
intention alone points to a definite political outlook. Wytten-
bach was the life and soul of a group of Kantians which had
been formed in Trier in the first years of the new century.
Marx’s father belonged to it himself. Wyttenbach, scholar,
historian, archaeologist and humanist, educated his pupils in
a free, cosmopolitan spirit, entirely dissimilar to that prevailing
in the royal Prussian high schools. He had a high conception
of his calling, as is demonstrated by the speeches he made each
year at the ceremonial departure to the university of the pupils
who were leaving. These were always fully reported in the
Trier newspapers. ‘A teacher cannot alter a child’s indivi-
duality,’ he said. ‘But he can thwart or help it, cripple or
develop it.’ The wearisome phrases about throne and altar,
prevalent, nay, actually prescribed at the time, were never
used by him.
The police did not concern themselves with the high school
until 1830. The Prussian authorities, in conformity with the
duty incumbent upon them of winning over their new subjects,
shut their eyes and let Wyttenbach do as he liked. After 1830
this state of affairs altered. The persecution of the ‘demagogues’
began. A commission ‘for the suppression of politically dan-
gerous groups’ had been established in Berlin. It directed its
attention to Trier. Schnabel, the admink Native head of the
district of Saarbrucken, with whom denouncing was a passion,
had all and sundry spied upon by his agent, a degenerate
individual named Nohl.
Nohl §ent his denunciations to Berlin by way of Schnabel
week by week. No one was safe, neither doctor nor artisan
nor innkeeper nor official, nor even the wife of the president
of the administrative district. All were demagogues and
Jacobins. The Coblenz school committee tried to defend
their traduced colleagues, but it helped them little. The local
officials, intimidated, dismayed, unsure what course to steer,
admitted that there were some partially ‘ill-disposed’ members
of the high school staff. Many of them were said to exercise
ORIGINS AND CHILDHOOD 13
a ‘bad influence 5 upon the boys. One master, Steininger, who
taught Marx natural science and mathematics, had ‘an innate
propensity to opposition 5 and Wyttenbach was too weak and,
moreover, protected his colleagues when anything against them
was ventured upon. A deplorable lack of discipline was to
be observed among the pupils. Boys of the top forms were
sometimes to be seen sitting about in the taverns until after
midnight and, what was far worse, forbidden literature circu-
lated among them. A copy of the speeches made at the
Hambacher Fest in 1833 was found in a boy’s possession. In
1834 it was discovered that the boys actually wrote poems with
political implications. One was arrested and was in the remand
prison for months.
Henceforth the Coblenz school committee and the Trier
officials kept the school under zealous observation. Between
1833 and 1835 it was the subject of dozens of official reports.
These were Marx’s last years at school. There can be no
doubt of the interest with which he must have followed these
events, which so closely concerned his masters, his schoolfellows
and himself. True, his name does not occur in the official
correspondence, but the official correspondence contains the
names of no schoolboys at all. He is certain to have made
rich use of his gift of writing lampoons upon his enemies.
The essays he wrote at his final examination cast a light
upon his mentality at the time. The influence of the French
liberal intelligence, particularly that of Rousseau, imparted
by his father and Wyttenbach, is plain enough. Of greater
significance are these phrases from an essay called ‘Observations
of a young man before choosing a career. 5
‘If we choose the career in which we can do humanity the
most good, burdens cannot overwhelm us, since they are nothing
but sacrifices for the benefit of all. . . . Experience t rates him
as the happiest who has made the greatest number happy,
and religion itself teaches us the ideal for which all strive^ to
sacrifice oneself for humanity. 5
The only upholders of these ideals at that time were the Left,
the members of the ‘Burschenschaft, 5 and the revolutionaries
who hungered in exile. In their appeals to youth the words:
be ready to sacrifice yourself, renounce your well-being
for humanity’s sake, constantly recur. They remained the*
14 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
»
fundamental maxim of Marx’s life. Paul Lafargue records
that ‘to work for humanity’ was his favourite motto.
The spy’s reports about the masters at his school turned out
to be grossly exaggerated. Investigation showed that ‘no good
spirit was prevalent’ among the boys, but that there was
nothing tangible against the staff. Wyttenbach was not dis-
missed, as the more extreme among his enemies demanded.
But he was given a joint headmaster, Loers, the Latin master,
a ‘well-disposed man,’ whose duty it was to preside over the
school discipline.
Loers’s appointment became known just as Karl left school.
It gave him a welcome opportunity of making a demonstration
— an innocuous demonstration, it is true, but the Prussian
Government allowed no others. The Government were not
blind to the state of mind expressed in such demonstrations,
nor were they intended to be.
It was usual for young men just going to the university to
call on their old masters to say good-bye. Marx visited every
one of them but Loers. ‘Herr Loers took it very much amiss
that you did not go and see him,’ Heinrich Marx wrote to his
son at Bonn. ‘You and Clemens were the only ones.’ He
told a white lie and said that Karl had gone with him to call
on Loers, but unfortunately he had been out.
In the middle of October, 1835, Karl Marx went to Bonn.
CHAPTER II
A HAPPY YEAR AT BONN
It had long ago been decided by the Marx family council
that Karl should go to the university. His father’s circum-
stances were quite comfortable, but he was not rich enough
to allow all his sons to study. Hermann, Karl’s moderately
gifted younger brother, was indentured to a Brussels business
house. But, however difficult it might occasionally be, means
must be found for Karl, the favourite child, the son in whom
his father lived again, the son who should achieve what his
father had been denied.
The university he should go to had been chosen too. Most
students from Trier went to Bonn as the nearest university
town. In 1835 an d 1836 the association of Trier students at
Bonn numbered more than thirty members. Later Karl was
intended to spend a few terms at another university — at Berlin,
if it could possibly be managed.
What he should study had also been decided for him. He
was to study law; not because at the age of sixteen he was
particularly attracted to the subject; he was equally interested
in literature, philosophy and science, especially physics and
chemistry. As he had no particular preference for any one
branch of knowledge, because he wanted to embrace them all,
he accepted his father’s advice without question. Practical
motives were undoubtedly Heinrich Marx’s chief consideration
in making the choice for his son. New courts were being
established in the Trier area, and intending lawyers had
excellent prospects of finding good and well-paid ppsts. Of
the seven students from Trier who matriculated at Bonn
University in 1834, four studied law.
Parents, brothers, sisters and friends accompanied Karl to
the ‘express yacht’ which left Trier at four o’clock in the
morning. Halley’s comet was in the sky. The covered boat
so grandiosely styled took him down the Moselle — the river
was almost the only link with the east of Germany — as far as
the Rhine, and then one of the recently introduced Rhine
15
l6 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
steamers took him upstream to Bonn, where he arrived on
Saturday, October 1 7, and entered his name at the University
on the same day.
Bonn, a town of nearly forty thousand inhabitants, was
distinctly bigger than Trier. Although it did not number
many more than seven hundred students, the University
dominated the life of the town. In the twenties and the
thirties the University of Bonn could rightly boast of the great
freedom it enjoyed. Students 5 associations had no need for
concealment. This did not apply only to associations of
students from the same town or district; it applied equally to
the definitely Liberal ‘Burschenschafter, 5 who drank and duelled
and sang, regarded with esteem by the citizens and benevolence
by the authorities. ‘They act so freely and openly, 5 an ex-
amining magistrate later wrote, ‘that the existence of the
societies is a secret to no one 5 — least of all to the university
authorities, who were not in the least perturbed by them.
On the contrary, they practically sanctioned them. As the
State officials did not wish to disturb the university, they
respected its independence and let things take their course.
A stop, and a very thorough stop, was put to this state of
affairs shortly before Marx came to Bonn. In April, 1835,
a small group of foolhardy young men had attempted to break
up the Federal Diet at Frankfurt and set up a provisional
government in its place. The rising was undertaken with
totally inadequate means and put down without any difficulty
whatever. But the governments of Germany were thoroughly
alarmed. Though some of them had hitherto had Liberal
impulses, they now started furiously building at ‘the saving
dam 5 which the decisions of the Vienna Conference of spring,
1834 — drafted by Metternich — imposed upon them the duty
of erecting against the ‘rising flood. 5 The drive descended
with especial fury upon the students 5 associations. Bonn’s
turn came a little later. When Marx came to Bonn in the
autumn of 1835, informers were daily sending ‘suspects 5 to
prison. University authorities, police and spies denounced,
arrested and expelled dozens of ‘Burschenschafter. 5
Not a single association that was connected in any way
with any general purpose, even the most discreet, survived the
stress of these severe measures. The only one to remain was
A HAPPY YEAR AT BONN 17
the ‘Korps,’ who, as a contemporary protested, regarded
‘brawling and carousing as the highest aim of a student’s life.’
The authorities were glad enough to close their eyes to the
activities of the ‘Korps.’ There were also small ‘tavern clubs,’
consisting of groups of students from the same towns, from
Cologne, Aachen, etc. These were not distinguished for their
rich intellectual life either. After most of the boldest, most
advanced and liberal-minded students had been eliminated
those who remained were too bewildered or too indifferent
not scrupulously to avoid all discussion of politics.
Lectures had not yet begun when Marx arrived at Bonn.
He had plenty of time to settle down. He took a room quite
close to the University, and immediately fell upon the lecture
list. The natural sciences were so badly represented at Bonn
that Marx resolved to postpone his study of physics and
chemistry until going to Berlin, where he would be able to
study under the real authorities on those subjects. Sufficient
remained for him to do nevertheless. He decided to attend
courses of lectures in no fewer than nine subjects. His father,
to whom he wrote of his plans, hesitated between pleasure at
so much zeal and fear that Karl might overwork. ‘Nine
courses of lectures seem rather a lot to me,’ he wrote, ‘and I
don’t want you to undertake more than mind and body can
stand. But if you can manage it, very well. The field of
knowledge is immense and time is short.’
In the end Marx only attended six courses. According to his
professors he was ‘industrious’ or ‘very industrious’ at them all.
Professor Welcker, under whom Marx studied Greek and
Roman mythology, stated that he was ‘exceptionally industrious
and attentive.’ In the summer term Marx attended four
courses. This was still a great deal, particularly when com-
pared with his later studies in Berlin, when he only, attended
fourteen courses of lectures in nine terms. The year at Bonn
was the only one in which he took his university studies seriously.
Somewhat to his own surprise, Marx discovered a taste for law,
his future profession. All the same he seems to have preferred
listening to the great Schlegel on Homer or the Elegies of
Propertius and D’Alton on the history of art.
However industriously he applied himself to them, his studies
failed to engross him completely. As he demonstrated aU
l8 KARL MARX.* MAN AND FIGHTER
school, he was no bookworm or spoilsport. He joined the Trier
‘tavern club’ and was one of its five presidents in the summer
term of 1836. Marx, a true son of the Rhineland, appreciated
a good ‘drop 5 all his life. In June he was condemned to one
day’s detention by the proctor for being drunk and disorderly.
The prison in which he served his sentence was a very jolly
one. A contemporary who studied at Bonn a year later than
Marx reports that the prisoners were allowed visitors, who
practically never failed to turn up with wine, beer and cards.
Sometimes the merry-making was such that the entertainment
expenses made a serious inroad into the prisoners 5 monthly
allowance. It was not because of the one day’s confinement
alone that Karl got into debt, in spite of the ample allowance
sent him by his generous father.
Marx joined another club as well. It was called the ‘Poets’
Club. 5 If the police records are to be believed, this club of
enthusiastic young men was not so entirely innocuous as it
seemed. Its founders were Fenner von Fenneberg, who took
a very active part in the revolution of 1848 and 1849, first
in Vienna and later in Baden, and a Trier student named
Biermann, who had come under suspicion while still at school
as the author of ‘seditious poetry. 5 He escaped to Paris to
avoid arrest, and it was proved that he had been in contact
with a Major Stieldorf, whom the police accused of agitating
for the annexation by Belgium of the western Trier territory.
Marx appears to have been very active in the ‘Poets’ Club.’
Moritz Carriere, a philosopher and aesthetician of some merit,
who at the time was the leader of a similar group at Gottingen,
with whom the Bonn club was on friendly terms, remembered
Marx as one of the three most important members. The other
two were Emanuel Geibel, who later made a reputation as a
lyric poet^ and Karl Grim, an adherent of the ‘true’ Socialism
which Marx was soon so pitilessly to combat and deride.
His father approved of Karl’s joining the ‘Poets’ Club. 5
He knew his son’s stormy nature and was never without
anxiety that it might run away with him. He did not like the
‘tavern club, 5 for he feared Karl might become involved in
a duel. He was relieved when he learned that Karl had joined
the ‘Poets’ Club’ and wrote: ‘I like your little group far better
^han the tavern. Young people who take pleasure in such
A HAPPY YEAR AT BONN 19
gatherings are necessarily civilised human beings, and set
greater store on their value as future good citizens than those
who set most store by rowdiness. 5
However, it soon appeared that even this little group was
not without its dangers. The police, suspecting treasonable
activities everywhere, started taking an interest in the ‘Poets’
Club.’ The club rules and the minutes of their meetings in
the winter of 1834-5 fell into the hands of the police-spy,
Nohl, who had now been sent to Bonn, but to their dis-
appointment the police were forced to admit that both the
rules and the minutes were politically completely innocuous.
According to the rules the members, ‘moved by a similar love
of belles lettres ,’ had decided to unite ‘for the reciprocal exercise
of their would-be poetical talents. 5 In spite of this the police
remained full of misgivings, and although their inquiries had
resulted in nothing tangible, the matter was handed over to
the University authorities, whose disciplinary court should
institute proceedings.
Marx’s name was not mentioned. His father, well informed
about events in Bonn, once more had cause for anxiety about
him, and not on account of the ‘Poets’ Club’ alone. In the
spring of 1836 a wild conflict broke out among the students,
and the association of Trier students was in the midst of the
fray. Conflict between the ‘Korps’ associations and the tavern
clubs had begun during the winter. The ‘Korps’ demanded
that the tavern clubs should merge with them. This the
tavern clubs refused to do, and the refusal resulted in hostile
encounters with members of the Borussia Korps, who were
‘true Prussians and aristocrats,’ and, under the leadership of
Counts von der Goltz, von der Schulenberg and von Heyden,
provoked, derided and challenged the ‘plebeians’ whenever
they met them. Their especial hatred was directed to the
Trier students. In the conflict of the feudal Borussians with
the sons of the bourgeois citizens of Trier there was, in a sense,
an element of class-war. ^
In 1858 Lassalle, after some unpleasant fellow had sent
him a challenge, wrote to Mane and asked him his opinion
of duels. Marx replied that it was obviously absurd to try
and decide whether duelling as such was consistent with the
principle; but within the biased limitations of bourgeois society*
20
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
it might sometimes be necessary to justify one’s individuality
in this feudal manner. As an eighteen-year-old student at
Bonn Marx evidently thought the same. An entry in the records
of the university disciplinary court states that Marx was once
seen bearing a weapon such as was usually used for duels.
His father in Trier heard of this incident and wrote to his
son: ‘Since when is duelling so interwoven with philosophy?
Men fight duels out of respect, nay, rather out of fear of public
opinion. And what public opinion? Not always the best —
far from it! So little consistency is there among mankind!
Do not let this taste — if it is not a taste, this disease — take root.
You might, after all, end by robbing yourself and your parents
of their finest hopes for you. I do not believe that a reasonable
man can so easily disregard these things. 3
There was foundation for his father’s fears. The duels the
students fought in the suburbs of Ippendorf and Kessenich
were anything but harmless. The young Count von Arnim
was killed in a duel in 1834, and soon afterwards a student
named Daniels, from Aachen, was killed too. Karl did not
heed his father’s warnings. He fought a duel, in all probability
with a Borussian, in August, 1836. He received a thrust over
the left eye.
How his father took the news is not known. Before the end
of the summer term he had given the Bonn university authorities
his consent to his son’s transfer to Berlin. He did not ‘merely
give his consent 3 but heavily underlined the statement that
it was ‘his wish. 3 A longer stay in Bonn would have profited
Karl nothing and only threatened duels on the one hand and
police persecution on the other.
CHAPTER III
JENNY VON WESTPHALEN
Marx spent the summer and autumn of 1836 in Trier, where
he became secretly engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, his
future wife.
Her antecedents were entirely different from his own. She
came from a different world. Her grandfather, Philipp West-
phalen (1724-1792) was adviser and confidential secretary to
Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick. A man of middle-class origin,
he owed his rise to his abilities alone. His contemporaries
spoke of him as a competent administrator and a far-seeing
and prudent politician. He never became a soldier but
remained a civil official throughout his career, but the victories
of Krefeld, Bellinghausen, Warburg, Wilhelmsthal and Minden
were his handiwork. Philipp Westphalen was the duke’s real
chief of staff during the Seven Years’ War. Delbriick, the
military historian, describes him as the Gneisenau of the
Seven Years’ War, and Bernhardi calls him the leading spirit
of Ferdinand’s staff. He was a gifted writer, and his notes
are among the most important historical sources for the
period.
The King of England esteemed the German so highly that he
appointed him adjutant-general of his army. Westphalen,
with the national pride that distinguished him and later
frequently brought him into conflict with the fawning courtiers
of the Guelf court, declined the honour. In the end he only
accepted ennoblement at the hands of the house of Brunswick
in order to be able to marry the woman of his choice r
He met her when she was on a visit to her uncle, General
Beckwith, commander of the English-Hanoverian army, w^ich
helped Duke Ferdinand in the struggle against the French.
Jeanie Wishart of Pitarrow came of the family of the Earls of
Argyll who played such a big role in the history of Scotland,
particularly during the Reformation and the Great Rebellion.
One of her forefathers, George Wishart, was burned at the
stake as a Protestant in 1547 and a little later another, Earl
21
22
KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
Archibald Argyll, mounted the scaffold in Edinburgh as a
rebel against King James II.
The younger branch of the family, to which Jeanie Wishart
of Pitarrow belonged — she was the fifth child of George
Wishart, an Edinburgh minister — also produced a number of
prominent men. William Wishart, Jenny’s great-grandfather,
accompanied the Prince of Orange to England, and his
brother was the celebrated Admiral James Wishart. Jenny’s
grandmother, Anne Campbell of Orchard, wife of the minister,
belonged to the old Scottish aristocracy too.
Ludwig von Westphalen, the youngest son of this German-
Scottish marriage, was born on July u, 1770. He was his
mother’s favourite child. She survived her husband by twenty
years and lived with her son until her death. He was an
exceptionally learned man. He spoke English, his second
native tongue, as well as German, and could read Latin,
Greek, Italian, French and Spanish. Marx used to remember
with pleasure how old Westphalen would recite whole hymns
of Homer by heart. It was from her father that Jenny and
Karl learned to love Shakespeare, a love they preserved all
their lifetime and handed on to their children.
Marx was sincerely attached to Jenny’s father, his ‘paternal
friend.’ The words with which he dedicated the thesis for his
doctor’s degree proceeded from a thankful heart. ‘May all
who are in doubt,’ he wrote, ‘have the good fortune that I have
had and be able to look up with admiration to an old man
who retains his youthful vigour and welcomes every advance
of the times with enthusiasm and passion for truth and an
idealism which, bright as sunshine and proceeding from deep
conviction, recognises only the word of truth before which all
the spirits of the world appear, and never shrinks back from
the retrograde ghosts which obscure the gloomy sky, but, full
of godlike energy and with manly, confident glance, penetrates
all {he chrysalis changes of the world and sees the empyrean
within. You, my paternal friend, provided me always with
a living argumentum ad oculos that idealism is not a figment of
the imagination but a truth.’
For a man with an outlook of that kind there was not much
scope in the German States of his time. Little bound him
*$o the hereditary Brunswick Guelf dynasty. He had no
JENNY VON WESTPHALEN 23
hesitation in entering the service of the Napoleonic kingdom of
Westphalia. His son and biographer, Ferdinand von West-
phalen, tried to attribute this step to his concern for the
well-being of his family, but this cannot be accepted as a
satisfactory explanation. His family always had been pros-
perous and was still prosperous at the time, and, besides,
Ludwig von Westphalen proved sufficiently a few years later
that he was willing to make greater sacrifices for his convictions
than that involved in declining an official position. The
Kingdom of Westphalia was such a notable advance on the
feudal state, and so full of beneficial reforms in every respect,
that a man as sensitive to the demands of the time as Ludwig
von Westphalen could not hesitate a moment in choosing
whether to serve a fossilized petty princeling or the brother
of the emperor of the world.
In the realm of King Jerome, just as in the Rhineland, the
popularity of the new regime, at first widespread among
middle-classes and peasants alike, dwindled away, to be re-
placed by aversion and ultimately bitter hostility. With every
increase in the taxes necessary to finance the never-ending
war, with every new calling-up of recruits, hostility grew. In
1813 Westphalen, then sub-prefect of the arrondissement of
Salzwedcl in the department of the Elbe, was arrested by
order of Marshal Davoust because of his hostility to the French
regime and confined in the fortress of Gifhorn. He was only
freed by the troops of the Allies.
He was confirmed in the office of administrative head of
the district by the Prussians and remained in Salzwedel for
another three years. In 1816 he was promoted and transferred
to Trier, which became his and his family’s second home.
Westphalen’s first wife, Elisabeth von Veltheim, was de-
scended from the Old Prussian aristocracy and died young, in
1807, leaving four children. Two daughters were brought up
by her relatives. They grew up far from their father and^he
only went to see them occasionally. Ferdinand, the elder of
the two sons, stayed in Salzwedel until he left school and then
went to live with his sisters. His father had practically no
influence upon his upbringing. He grew up in a thoroughly
reactionary environment to be a thorough reactionary himself
— arrogant, narrow-minded and bigoted. He actually became
24 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Prussian Minister of the Interior, and in the most reactionary
cabinet that Prussia ever had he was the most reactionary of
them all. Frederick William IV, the ‘romantic on the throne/
was later very friendly with him.
Ludwig von Westphalen’s second wife was Karoline Heubel,
daughter of a minor Prussian official from the Rhineland.
She was a clever and courageous woman. A picture of her
in her old age, with her large, gleaming eyes, enables one to
see how beautiful she was in her youth. There were three
children of this marriage. Jenny, the eldest, was born at
Salzwedel on February 12, 1814. The next child was a
daughter, of whom no more is known, and the third was
a son, Edgar, born in 1819.
Jenny, who later had to endure poverty in its shabbiest form
— for in London there was no money to buy a coffin for her
dead child — had a happy and carefree childhood. Her parents
were rich.
Ludwig von Westphalen’s salary in the early eighteen-
twenties was one thousand six hundred thalers a year, which
was a great deal at that time and place, and in addition there
was the yield of a respectable estate. At that time two good
furnished rooms could be rented at Trier for from six to seven
thalers a month, and the price of a four-course dinner every
day for a whole month was from six to seven thalers. The
Westphalens occupied a sumptuous house with a big garden
in one of the best streets of Trier.
Heinrich Marx and his family lived next door. In a small
town like Trier everybody knows practically everybody else.
Children living in neighbouring houses know each other best
of all. Jenny’s favourite playmate was Karl’s elder sister,
Sophie. Edgar, who was scarcely a year younger than Karl,
sat next to him on the same school bench. Westphalen,
himself half-German and half-Scotch, had no national or racial
prejudices. Lessing was one of his favourite authors. That
Heinrich Marx had only recently become a Christian worried
him not at all. The children made friends and the fathers
followed suit. The Marx children played in the Westphalens’
garden, and in his old age Edgar von Westphalen still remem-
bered with pleasure the friendly greeting that old Marx always
had for him and his sisters.
JENNY VON WESTPHALEN 25
A close friendship sprang up between old Westphalen and
Karl Marx. The old man — he was in his seventies — used
to enjoy wandering ‘over our wonderfully picturesque hills
and woods’ with the young schoolboy. Of the talks that they
had on these occasions Marx was fondest of recalling those
in which Westphalen awakened in him his first interest in the
character and teachings of Saint-Simon. Marx’s father was
a Kantian. The pedigree of scientific socialism according to
Friedrich Engels is well known: ‘We German Socialists are
proud of being descended, not only from Saint-Simon, Fourier
and Owen but from Kant, Fichte and Hegel as well.’
Laura Lafargue burned the whole of the correspondence
between her parents. We do not know when the love-affair
between the two young people first began, and we believe it
to be a waste of time to try and find out from the rare and
obliterated traces that are left. At the time of Marx’s death
an old inhabitant of Trier could still remember ‘lovely Jenny’
and Marx, the young student, whom he recollected as ‘prac-
tically the ugliest human being whom the sun could ever have
shone on.’ An older friend of his, he said, still used to speak
ardently of the charming, bewitching creature, and neither
he nor anybody else could understand how her choice had
possibly managed to fall upon Marx. True, he admitted that
Marx’s early demonstrated talent and force of character and
his prepossessing ways with women made up for his ugly
exterior. One seems to hear the voice of a spurned suitor
in all this.
Karl’s father was at first the only person to know of the
secret engagement. He knew his son too well not to know
that it was useless to forbid him something which Karl would
certainly not have allowed himself to be forbidden. He ex-
pressed what reassured him in his letters to his son. He
admonished him in this affair, as in all others, to be as candid
with his father as with a friend, to test himself rigorously and,
above all, to be mindful of man’s sacred duty to the weaker
sex. Karl, if he persisted in his decision, must become a man
at once. Six weeks later he wrote again: ‘I have spoken to
Jenny, and I should have liked to have been able to reassure
her completely. I did my uttermost, but I could not talk
everything away. I do not know how her parents will take
26 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
it. The judgment of relatives and of the world is after all no
trifle. . . . She is making a priceless sacrifice for you. She
is manifesting a self-denial which cold reason alone can fully
appreciate. Woe betide you if ever in your life you forget it!
You must look into your heart alone. The sure, certain know-
ledge that in spite of your youth you are a man, deserving the
world’s respect, nay, fighting and earning it, giving assurance
of your steadfastness and future earnest striving, and imposing
silence on evil tongues for past mistakes, must proceed from
you alone. 5
At the time of his engagement Karl Marx was an eighteen-
year-old student with numerous inclinations and a highly
uncertain future. As the second son of a numerous family,
with no considerable financial prospects to look forward to,
he would have to fight for his own place in the world, and he
would need a number of years for the purpose. Jenny, four
years older than he, was the daughter of a rich and noble
State official, the ‘prettiest girl in Trier, 5 the ‘queen of the ball. 5
When Marx visited Trier in 1863 he found Jenny still survived
in old people’s memories as the ‘fairy princess. 5 The engage-
ment conflicted with all the prejudices of the bourgeois and
noble world.
Karl ‘had to become a man at once. 5 In the middle of
October he went to Berlin and plunged head over heels into
his books. In order to marry it was necessary to complete his
studies as quickly as possible, pass his examinations and find
a job. In the meantime all Jenny could do was wait. She
was twenty-two years old. Many of her friends were married,
and the rest were engaged. She rejected all her suitors —
officers, landed proprietors and government officials. People
in Trier started to talk.
As long as Karl had been in Trier what people said did not
worry Jenny. When she grew afraid he had been there to
support her, full of courage and plans for the future. She
believed in him, in his future and hers. But when he went
she was alone. Nobody must notice anything, she must laugh
gaily, pay visits, go to dances, as behoved a girl of marriageable
age belonging to the best society. Karl’s father and his sister
Sophie were her only confidants. With them she could talk
openly of her love and of her anxieties.
JENNY VON WESTPHALEN 27
The two persons dearest to Marx, Jenny and his father,
were often filled with anxiety for the future. His father wrote
to him at the beginning of March, 1837, and said that though
from time to time his heart delighted in thoughts of him and
of the future, he could not shake off anxious and gloomy fore-
bodings when the thought struck him: Was Karl’s heart in
conformity with his head, his capacity? Was there room for
the earthly but tender feelings so consolatory to the man of
feeling in this vale of tears? Karl’s heart was clearly possessed
by a daemon it was not granted everybody to be possessed by,
but was the nature of this daemon divine or Faustian? Would
Karl — and this doubt was not the least painful of those that
afflicted his father’s heart — ever be susceptible of a true, human,
domestic happiness? Would Karl — and this doubt, since he
had recently begun to love a certain person not less than his
own child, was no less tormenting — ever be in a position to
bring happiness into his most immediate surroundings? He
felt sorry for Jenny. Jenny, who with her pure, childish
disposition was so utterly devoted to Karl, was from time to
time a victim, against her will, of a kind of fear, heavy with
foreboding, that he could not explain.
In another letter six months later he wrote: ‘You can be
certain, and I myself am certain, that no prince could estrange
her from you. She cleaves to you body and soul, and she is
making a sacrifice for you of which most girls are certainly not
capable. That is something you must never forget.’
Jenny waited impatiently for Karl’s letters. They came
rarely. Marx was never a very good correspondent. To make
up for it, at Christmas, 1836, Jenny received a volume of poems,
The Book of Love , dedicated to his ‘dear, ever-beloved Jenny
von Westphalen.’ Sophie wrote to her brother that when
Jenny came to see Marx’s parents on the day after Christmas
‘she wept tears of joy and pain when she was given the poems.’
The three volumes of The Book of Love have long since
vanished. What survives of Marx’s poetical attempts — two
poems published in a periodical, the Athenaum> a volume of
poems dedicated to his father, scenes from Oulanem , a tragedy,
and some chapters from Scorpion and Felix , a novel in the manner
of Sterne — justify the harsh judgment that Marx himself passed
on them. He described them as sentiment wildly and formlessly
28
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
expressed, completely lacking in naturalness and entirely
woven out of moonshine, with rhetorical reflections taking the
place of poetical feeling. All the same he granted them a
certain warmth and straining after vital rhythm.
Jenny’s position became more and more intolerable. She
hesitated when his father suggested that Karl should reveal
the secret and ask her parents for her hand. She seems to
have been worried by the difference in age between herself
and Karl. Eventually she agreed to Karl’s father’s suggestion
and Karl wrote to Trier. How the demand for her hand was
received we do not know. There seem to have been difficulties
and some opposition, the leader of which is sure to have been
Ferdinand, the subsequent Prussian Minister of the Interior,
who had just been transferred to an official position in Trier,
where he was soon noted for his ‘great zeal and moderate
intelligence.’
Eventually Jenny’s parents gave their consent. At the end
of 1837, Karl Heinrich Marx, a student nineteen years of age,
became officially engaged to Jenny von Westphalen.
CHAPTER IV
STUDENT YEARS IN BERLIN
There were seven hundred students at Bonn, but several
thousand in Berlin. Bonn, in spite of spies and informers,
was a pleasant, patriarchal provincial town, in which it was
not easy to get away from the usual students 5 round, with its
taverns and duels. The University of Berlin, compared to the
other universities in Germany, was a ‘workhouse 5 compared
to a ‘tavern, 5 to quote Ludwig Feuerbach.
At that period Berlin still retained many relics of the times
of the Brandenburg Electors. The walls still surrounded the
Old Town, and the old towers, only the names of which remain
to-day, were still standing. Gardens, meadows and fields still
made deep inroads into the maze of narrow, crooked alleys.
Schoneberg was still the wooded beautiful mountain , and the
unpretentious houses of the Nollendorfs still stood on the
Nollendorfplatz, which teems with traffic to-day. It lagged
behind the young industrial towns of the Rhineland in economic
and social development, but with its three hundred thousand
inhabitants it was second only to Vienna, the biggest town
on German-speaking territory, and was the first big town that
Marx became acquainted with.
He matriculated in the faculty of law on October 22, 1837,
took a modest room in the Mittelstrasse, not far from the
university, and reluctantly proceeded to pay calls upon a few
influential friends of his father’s to whom he had been given
introductions, and then cut himself off from all social inter-
course. He saw no one and spoke to no one. •»
Bonn had taught him that an attractive title to a course of
lectures is not always a reliable guide to its contents. In his
first term he attended only three courses of lectures — by
Steffens, the philosopher, on anthropology, Savigny on juris-
prudence and Gans on criminal law.
Gans and Savigny, the two stars of the university, were
bitter opponents. Friedrich Karl Savigny was the founder
and principal theorist of the school of historical jurisprudence
29
30 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
which rejected the conception of natural right as an empty
abstraction and regarded law as something concrete arising
out of the spirit and historical development of a nation. This
boiled down in practice to a simple sanctification of everything
handed down from the past. /Thejdeologis t of the Christian-
German state had Hisr.e.rneH tv rpvnTViHnn^ ry implicati ons of
the philosophy of Hegel at a time when the ru ling powers still
regarcfe^lt^^^olutika^ strongest, p ossible support.")
His niost important adversary was Eduard Gans. Hegel
had summoned the young scholar, who possessed a gift of
eloquence not granted to other lecturers, to the faculty of
jurisprudence. Gans was not a thinker of special originality.
All his life he remained faithful to his great teacher’s system,
but he went his own way in the conclusions he drew from
Hegel’s fundamental principles. In opposition to the school
of historical law that looked towards the past, he set up Saint-
Simonistic ideas looking towards the future. He had a glowing
enthusiasm for the complete freeing of the human personality,
an enthusiasm for all plans which had as their goal the complete
reconstruction of society. His controversy with Savigny was
more than merely a legal one. It assumed a philosophical,
actually a political character.
After the death of Hegel in 1831 Gans lectured on history
as well as law, the history of the French Revolution and its
salutary effects on the rest of Europe in particular. The big
lecture hall was filled to overflowing by his audience. His
lectures were attended not only by students but by officials,
officers, men of letters, ‘the whole of Berlin,’ in fact everyone
who was still concerned for political and social questions in
those fusty times. They came to listen to the free speech of
a free man.
The f^ct that the university was freedom’s only sanctuary
was one of the principal factors in its importance. Gans once
took a French scholar round Berlin. In Unter den Linden
he showed him the building next to the university. ‘Look!’
he said. ‘The university next to the arsenal. That is the
symbol of Prussia.’ Prussia was an enormous barracks. A
narrow and spiteful censorship waged a pitiless war on in-
tellectual freedom. It was a time when a censor (he was the
one with whom Marx was destined to tussle when editor of
STUDENT YEARS IN BERLIN 31
the Rheinische Zeitmg) suppressed an advertisement of a trans-
lation of Dante’s Divine Comedy by ‘Philalethes,’ the later
King John of Saxony, with the comment that ‘no comedy should
be made of divine things. 5 A police regime of the pettiest kind
hampered the citizen’s activities in every direction and made
his life increasingly intolerable. Only at the university was
there a modicum of freedom of speech. Gans was one of the
few who made real use of his academic freedom. He expressed
opinions and praised the French Revolution in his lectures in
a way he could not possibly have done in books.
Savigny and Steffens testified to the zeal with which Marx
listened to them, and Gans’s report on him was that he was
‘exceptionally industrious.’
Marx, obliged to study law, felt, to use his own expression,
‘above all an urge to wrestle with philosophy.’ He made up
his mind to combine philosophy and law. He worked through
the sources and the commentaries and translated the first two
books of the Pandects — ‘absolutely uncritically and just like
a schoolboy,’ as he wrote to his father in retrospect. He
worked at a three-hundred-page philosophy of law, covering
the whole territory of law, only to see at the end that ‘without
philosophy nothing could be accomplished.’ In addition he
made excerpts from works on the history of art, translated
Latin classics, started studying English and Italian in order at
the end of term ‘once more to search for the dance of the Muses
and the music of the satyrs.’ These poems, he wrote to his
father, were the only ones in which he ‘caught a glimpse, as
if by the touch of a magic wand, of the realm of true poetry
as a distant fairy palace,’ and ‘all his creations fell away to
nothing.’
‘What with all these activities, in my first term I stayed up
many nights, fought many battles, experienced much t internal
and external excitement. In the end I emerged not very much
enriched, having neglected nature and art, and rejected friend:
ships.’ His health had been seriously affected in the process,
but he did not spare himself but cast himself once more into
the arms of philosophy. Once more he wanted ‘to plunge into
the ocean, but with the firm intention of finding mental nature
to be necessarily just as concretely and firmly grounded as
physical nature . . . my aim was to search for the idea in real
32 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
things themselves. 5 Marx had read fragments of the Hegelian
philosophy, whose ‘grotesque, craggy melody 5 he had not
found to his taste. He wrote a dialogue entitled Cleanthes ,
or the point of departure and necessary progress of philosophy , a
philosophical-dialectical treatment of divinity as manifested
as an idea-in-itself, as religion and as history, only to find at
the end that his dearest child had been ‘nursed in moonshine,
and that it was as if a false siren had carried it in her arms
and handed it over to the enemy. 5 His last sentence was the
beginning of the Hegelian system. Mortification at finding
himself forced to bend the knee to a philosophical 'system that
he hated made him ill. During his indisposition he read
Hegel from beginning to end, and most of HegePs pupils as
well, and ‘chained himself firmly and more firmly still to the
present philosophy of the world from which he had thought
to escape. 5 By the lat e summer o f 1837 he had become an
He gelian . —
^ He was living at the time at Stralau, a country place near
Berlin, where the doctor had sent him. Fresh air, plenty of
walks and a healthier life enabled him to ‘ripen from a pale-
faced weakling to robust bodily vigour. 5 Moreover, it was at
Stralau that he met the men who introduced him to the
‘Doktorklub 5 and played a great part in the next stage of his
development.
The ‘Doktorklub 5 had been founded a few years previously.
There were no tavern clubs or local students 5 associations in
Berlin. Students who were in sympathy with one another met
on fixed days at inns and coffee-houses, which in Berlin were
also reading-rooms. In one of these inns in the Franzosische-
strasse there met regularly a number of students and young
graduates united by a similar interest in literary and philo-
sophical, questions. In the course of time these meetings took
on the character of an informal club and they were transferred
to private premises where there would be no undesired guests
and more open speech was possible. ‘In this circle of ambitious
young men, 5 a member of the ‘Doktorklub 5 wrote in his
reminiscences, ‘there reigned that spirit of idealism, that
enthusiastic urge for knowledge, that liberal spirit that still
so thoroughly animated the youth of that time. Poems and
other work done by us used to be read aloud and criticised
STUDENT YEARS IN BERLIN 33
at our meetings, but our special interest was the philosophy
of Hegel, which was still in its prime and held sway more or
less over the whole educated world, though individual voices
had already been raised against the system and a split between
the Rights and the Lefts had already become perceptible in
the ranks of the Hegelians themselves. 5
Marx became a frequent visitor to the club, and through it he
made numerous acquaintances in Berlin literary and scientific
circles including Bettina von Arnim, the last Romantic, in
whose salon in Unter den Linden the most varied society met
— young writers and old generals, Liberals and Conservatives,
ministers and Jewish journalists, believers and atheists. Marx
does not seem to have been a frequent guest of Bettina’s, and
in his poems he wrote a pointed epigram about the ‘new-fangled
Romantic. 5 Bettina remembered the young student well.
When she came to Trier in 1838 (or 1839) he had to accompany
her on all her excursions. Marx only had a week to spend in
his native town, and was left with practically no time to talk
to Jenny at all.
The university became unimportant for Marx. True, he
had to attend the prescribed lectures, the lectures essential
for a law student if he were to pass his examinations, but more
than that he did not do. In the eight terms he spent in Berlin
after the summer of 1837 on ly attended seven courses of
lectures, and for three whole terms he attended no lectures at
all. His interests were now confined to philosophy. Some of
his notebooks of this period have been preserved. They are
full of excerpts from Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Bacon, and
other philosophical classics.
The political under-currents of the time masqueraded, were
forced to masquerade, as philosophical schools of thought.
Division appeared in the Hegelian camp. The ‘Old’^Hegelians
remained loyal to the system and conservative ideals of
the older Hegel, while the ‘Young 5 Hegelians laid even greater
stress on the revolutionary elements in the Hegelian method,
on the Hegelian dialectic, which regards nothing as permanent
but everything as flowing or becoming, recognises the contra-
diction in everything and is thus the ‘algebra of the revolution. 5
The breach between the two schools of thought became wider
and wider and the ‘Doktorklub 5 was in the very midst of the
3
34 KARL MARX.* MAN AND FIGHTER
rising battle. The challenging ‘Young’ Hegelian group began
to crystallise out of it. Its most important representatives
were Adolph Rutenberg, Karl Friedrich Koppen and Bruno
Bauer.
Marx met Rutenberg first, and it was probably Rutenberg
who introduced him to the ‘Doktorklub.’ In November, 1837,
he was calling him his most intimate friend. Rutenberg was
a former ‘Burschenschafter,’ and had served long sentences in
Prussian prisons. He became a lecturer in geography and
history at the Cadet School but was soon dismissed because of
the unfavourable influence he was said to exercise on his pupils
and because of the Liberal newspaper correspondence he wrote.
He became a professional writer. He was somewhat super-
ficial, not overweighted with learning, and an easy and quick
writer, and soon came to occupy a foremost position among
the publicists of Berlin. Political journalism, properly so-
called, did not exist in Germany of the thirties. The draconic
censorship alone was sufficient to nip it in the bud. An
inadequate substitute was provided by the general correspon-
dence with which the journalists of Berlin kept the provincial
Press supplied. There was very little in this correspondence.
It contained few facts and still fewer ideas, but that left all
the more scope for Liberal expressions and veiled hints about
the remarkable things the writer would be able to disclose
were the sword of Damocles, i.e. the censorship, not dangling
over his head. During the period in question these letters
from the capital fulfilled a definite need. They expressed the
elementary interests of society and strengthened the elementary
protest against the ruling powers. Rutenberg was one of the
most prominent representatives of this type of journalism, and
as such he had a certain importance in Marx’s life. At the
beginning of 1842 he was appointed editor of the Rheinische
Zeitung . In this position, when he had to prove himself as
a^enuine publicist for the first time, he was a complete failure.
He was not fit for more than writing Berlin letters full of veiled
hints. Rutenberg sank lower and lower and ended up in
doubtful hole-and-corner journalism.
Karl Friedrich Koppen was a man of entirely different
stamp. He, like Rutenberg, was a history master by profession,
but was a man of real learning and scholarship, with a solid
STUDENT YEARS IN BERLIN 35
and extensive knowledge in many fields. At the same time he
was of a modest and retiring disposition, with no aptitude
whatever for placing himself in the limelight, unlike Rutenberg,
who was very skilled at it indeed. Koppen’s chief work, an
account of Lamaism, has in many respects not been superseded
to this day. He was the first German historian to put forward
an unprejudiced view of the Terror in the French Revolution.
Even some of his letters on transitory themes have preserved
their value. Those he wrote about Berlin University are still
prized by scholars and specialists. It is only as a politician
and a pioneer of the Socialist movement that Koppen is still
not appreciated according to his deserts. He took an active
part in the formation of the first workers 5 organisations in
Berlin in 1848 and 1849. When the Reaction set in he was
one of the few intellectuals who continued working in the
workers 5 clubs in spite of the severe penalties he had to suffer.
Koppen remained true to his ideals, and his friendship with
Marx survived all the vicissitudes of life. When Marx visited
him in Berlin in 1861 he found him c the old Koppen still. 5
He wrote to Engels that the two occasions he ‘pub-crawled 5
with him really did him good.
The most important member of the group was Bruno Bauer,
a lecturer in theology. A contemporary describes him thus:
‘Somewhat small in build and of medium height, his de-
meanour is calm and he confronts you with a confident, serene
smile; his frame is compact, and you observe with great interest
the fine but definite features of his face, the boldly protruding,
angular and finely pointed nose, the high-arched brow, the
fine-cut mouth, the almost napoleonic figure. 5 Generally dis-
tracted and absent-minded, with his gaze directed into space —
Rutenberg 5 s children always used to say that Uncle Bauer was
looking into Africa — he used to liven up in argument. His
wide erudition, his gift of precise definition, his irony and the
boldness of his thought made Bauer the chosen leader of the
Young Hegelian movement. It was not till later, when
the time came to proceed from analysis to synthesis and
establish positive, practical aims that he failed. He remained
the critic; and criticism for criticism’s sake, ‘absolute criticism 5
became for him an end in itself. But at the end of the thirties
and the beginning of the forties, when the times demanded
36 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
criticism of the old and the shattering of ancient idols, Bruno
Bauer was in the very forefront of the battle.
In 1837, when Marx joined the group, Young Hegelianism
was just coming into existence. David Friedrich Strauss had
published his Life of Jesus two years before. It was the first
Hegelian onslaught on the foundations of official religion.
It is somewhat difficult to-day to realise its full significance.
Society of that day was divided into strata. It was a rigid
framework, resting solely on the sanction of religion, and reason
had to adapt itself to it in all modesty and humility as to some-
thing willed by God. As long as the foundation on which it
rested, namely the principle of divine revelation, stood intact,
all criticism of any detail of the social structure was impotent.
But any thrust at that principle that went home shook the
whole structure to its depths.
Before Strauss Hegelian philosophy had peacefully and har-
moniously cohabited with religion. Certainly it was only a
marriage of prudence, but from the point of view of the old
world it was a highly useful and convenient one. Strauss was
the first to disturb this harmonious bliss. Everybody imme-
diately realised that it forestalled a general attack on the whole
position. Marx wrote a few years later:
‘Criticism of religion is the hypothesis of all criticism. The
foundation of irreligious criticism is that man makes religion
and religion does not make man. But man is no abstract
being lurking somewhere outside and apart from the world.
Man means the world of men, the state, society. Religion,
which is a distorted outlook on the world because the world
is itself distorted, is the product of the state and of society.
Religion is a fantastic materialisation of the human entity,
because the human entity has no true reality. Hence the fight
against religion is a direct fight against a world the spiritual
aroma of which it is. 5
^Strauss found anything but support among the Hegelians
of Berlin. The essays published by Bruno Bauer in 1835 an< ^
1836 were among the most trenchant of the attacks that were
made on him. Bauer flatly denied the right of philosophy to
criticise Christian dogma, and he did so with such dogmatism
and violence that Strauss confidentally predicted that he would
end up in the camp of the extreme bigots. Bauer took a
STUDENT YEARS IN BERLIN 37
different path, however, and it was the bigots who forced him
down it. Apart from the fact that their attack was directed
at the philosophy of Hegel, which a Hegelian like Bauer was
necessarily obliged to defend, the God whom they so martially
proclaimed was not the mild Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount
but the gloomy, vindictive Jehovah of the Old Testament.
Their Holy Book was the Old Testament far more than the
New, and it was this that set Bauer on his critical tack.
He made his debut in this direction in 1837 an d 1 838; at
a time, that is to say, when Marx had become a member of
the ‘Doktorklub.’ Marx took part in the development ofYoung
Hegelianism which originated in the club; moreover, he was,
as far as we can tell — unfortunately there is no period of Marx’s
life about which we are so badly informed — one of the most
active and progressive spirits in its development. He took his
place at the most extreme wing from the start. Ruthless con-
sistency was a characteristic of the very beginning of his
independent intellectual life. At the end of 1836 he expressed
his views about law in a letter to his father, who replied: ‘Your
views about law are not without truth, but systematised they
would be very calculated to cause storms.’ The ageing Trier
lawyer had lived through the storms of the French Revolution
and the Napoleonic Wars, and yearned for peace and quiet.
His son liked storms and looked out for them, though for the'
time being in the realm of intellectual conflict only.
Most of the members of the ‘Doktorklub’ were older than
Marx, and many of them were much older. That did not
prevent them from accepting him as an equal practically from
the first. As early as 1837, when he was a student of nineteen
and was nursing the idea of founding a literary paper, his
friends Rutenberg and Bauer were able to assure him that
‘all the aesthetic celebrities of the Hegelian school’ were willing
to collaborate. The club used to meet often, either in private
houses or in small inns in the neighbourhood of the university
For a short time it met every day. The books and essays to
which it gave birth demonstrate its breadth of interests and
the rapid development through which it passed.
At first the chief subject of discussion was religion. To begin
with the battle raged round the question of the distortion
of true Christianity by mythology and the assimilation of
38 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Christianity to the conclusions of contemporary philosophy, but
it quickly developed into an attack on religion itself. Though
the members of the club did not definitely emerge as atheists
until 1842, most of them had long been aware of what lay at
the end of the road they had embarked upon, and occasionally
ceremoniously greeted one another with the jesting appellation
of ‘Your irreverence/
In the second half of the thirties the Government started a
drive against Hegelianism, and that drove the ‘Doktorklub 5
into political opposition, though an outward fillip was still
required. The ‘Doktorklub 5 gave the initiative at the ‘serenade 5
of students on Gans’s birthday in 1838. The celebrations were
intended to honour in Gans the sturdy champion, not only
of the Hegelian tradition, but also of the seven Gottingen
professors who, to the applause of the whole of Germany, had
preferred sacrificing their office to taking an oath of loyalty
to the King of Hanover who had abolished the Constitution.
But, so far as the club was concerned, being in political opposi-
tion was still far from involving them in taking an active part
in contemporary life. Rutenberg was the only one who
demanded that they should take the plunge into contemporary
life. His insistence that the time had come to abandon fruitless
‘brooding 5 and pass from the world of theory to the world of
action was answered by Bauer, who maintained that there
could be no question yet of their direct participation in the life
of the time. Before they could have any practical influence
upon the world, and that in the near future, they must, in his
view, effect an intellectual revolution in men’s minds. There
was no other way. Marx shared Bauer’s opinion. The old
must be intellectually annihilated before it could be annihilated
on the material plane. The alteration of the world would
necessarily follow from the new interpretation put upon it by
philosophers. In other words a virtue was made of impotence.
Ibis earned the club the following lampoon in classical metre:
So far our deeds are all words and are like to remain so;
Abstractions we have in our minds are bound to come true of
themselves . 1
Bruno Bauer was still faithful to this view when he moved
1 Unsere Taten sind Worte bis jetzt und noch lange
Hinter die Abstraktion stellt sich die Praxis von selbst.
STUDENT YEARS IN BERLIN 39
from Berlin to Bonn in 1838. In 1840 and 1841 the Berlin
group moved faster and faster towards the Left. In the
summer of 1840 an observer characterised it as ‘thoroughly
devoted to the idea of constitutional monarchy/ Koppen
wrote his book on Frederick the Great and his Opponents and
dedicated it to ‘his friend Karl Heinrich Marx of Trier. 5
Koppen honoured Frederick, £ in whose spirit we swore to
live and die, 5 as the enemy of Christian-German reaction.
His basic idea was that the state was embodied in its purest
form in a monarchy ruled over by a monarch like Frederick,
a philosopher, a free servant of the world spirit. Renewal
could only come from the top.
The phase of Liberal constitutional monarchism soon ran
its course. By the winter of 1840-1 the club were calling
themselves ‘friends of the people, 5 and their theoretical position
was therefore at the extreme left wing of revolutionary repub-
licanism. Rutcnberg in his Berlin letters compared the so-
called reading rooms of Berlin with the Paris coffee-houses
on the eve of the Revolution and Koppen wrote his essays
on the Terror. The club had begun ‘direct 5 participation in
contemporary life.
During this period Marx published nothing, and no manu-
scripts dating from these years have been preserved. His
share in the intellectual life of the club, and it was an important
one, was only expressed indirectly in the writings of others.
It appears from a letter Koppen wrote to Marx on June 3,
1841, that many of the ideas expressed by Bruno Bauer in his
essay on ‘The Christian State and Our Times, 5 one of the first
in which political deductions were drawn from religious criti-
cism, were Marx’s. Koppen remarked that as long as Marx
was in Berlin he had no ‘personal, so to speak, self-thought
thoughts of his own 5 ; which was obviously a very* friendly
and highly exaggerated piece of self-depreciation, but at the
same time gives a clue to how much Marx was able to give_,
his friends. They treasured him as ‘a warehouse of thoughts,
a workshop of ideas. 5 Marx lived in their memories as the
‘young lion, 5 combative, turbulent, quick-witted, as bold in
posing problems as in solving them. In the Christliches
Heldengedicht , written in 1842, after Marx had left Berlin, Marx
appeared as the club remembered him:
40 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
Who’s this approaching who thus rants and raves?
*Tis the wild fury, black-maned Marx of Treves;
See him advance, nay spring upon the foe
As though to seize and never let him go.
See him extend his threatening arms on high
To seize the heavenly canopy from the sky;
See his clenched fists, and see his desperate air,
As though ten thousand devils had him by the hair. 1
It must not be supposed that the ‘Doktorklub 5 confined itself
to bringing together a collection of academic intellectuals for
the purpose of philosophical discussion only. Most of its
members were young, exuberant and always ready for mischief.
Protest against the crass philistinism that surrounded them and
the absurd, petty regimentation of personal life by the police
occasionally broke out in unruly forms. Bruno Bauer appears
in the police records as a ‘heavy drinker 5 and Rutenberg was
reported to have taken part in street fights. Edgar Bauer, a
younger brother of Bruno, was punished for ostentatiously
smoking in the street, which was forbidden by the police.
Liebknecht describes in his memoirs how Marx celebrated
a reunion with Edgar Bauer in London in the fifties. They
engaged in a ‘pub-crawl 5 and not a single tavern on their
route was allowed to remain unvisited. When they could
drink no longer they started throwing stones at the street lamps
under cover of darkness and went on until the police came
and they had to run. Marx developed a turn of speed no one
had thought him capable of. He was nearly forty at the time,
father of a numerous family, author of works of far-reaching
importance. One can imagine what he must have been
capable of in his twenties in Berlin.
Marx, once accepted into the ranks of the Young Hegelians,
paid practically no more attention to the university. It had
been ‘purged. 5 Eduard Gans, Hegel’s most important pupil
and the only Hegelian in the faculty of law, died young, in
1839. Bauer had to leave the university soon afterwards. He
1 Wer jaget hinterdrein mit wildem Ungestiim?
Ein schwarzer Kerl aus Trier, ein markhaft Ungetum.
Er gehet, hupfet nicht, er springet auf den Hacken
Und raset voller Wut und gleich als wollt’ er packen
Das weite Himmelszelt und zu der Erde ziehn
Streckt er die Arme sein weit in die Liifte hin.
Geballt die bose Faust, so tobt er sondcr Rasten,
Als wenn ihn bei den Schopf zehntausend Teufel fassten.
STUDENT YEARS IN BERLIN 41
was unspeakably obnoxious to the pietists, and all Altenstein,
Minister of Public Worship and Education, who was favourably
inclined towards the Hegelians, was able to do for him was to
have him transferred to Bonn. Reactionaries were installed
in the Hegelians 5 places. Gans’s chair was filled by Julius
Stahl, theorist of Prussian absolutism, who in the fifties became
a practitioner of it as well. The extreme bigots, the people
whom Hegel had described a few years previously as the
‘rabble 5 with whom he had to ‘tussle, 5 set the tone in the
university.
With the accession of King Frederick William IV the
Christian-Romantic reaction set in in full force. He who did
not bow and hold his peace was visited with exemplary
punishment. Of academic freedom no trace was left. The
university became an annexe of the barracks.
In his first student years Marx had had hopes of becoming
a university lecturer at Berlin. This was impossible now. He
could not even expect to take his doctor’s degree at the uni-
versity. His thesis would have to be submitted to Stahl,
against whom the students — with Marx certainly among them
— had noisily demonstrated when he was appointed to Gans’s
place. As Varnhagen noted in his diary, this was the first
outward opposition to the new government.
Marx’s father died in May, 1838. During the last year the
family’s material position had been worsening. In Trier Jenny
was waiting. And on the other side Bruno Bauer was urging
his friend to hurry. It was time to put a stop to his ‘shilly-
shallying 5 and end his ‘wearisome vacillation about the sheer,
nonsensical farce of his examinations. 5 Marx, he said, should
come to Bonn, where he would find things easy. At Bonn
he would be able to get a lectureship. The professors at Bonn
knew they were no philosophers and that the students wanted
to hear philosophy. ‘Come here and the new battle will begin. 5
Marx doubted whether everything would turn out to be so easy
at Bonn as Bauer hoped. He was far more engrossed with a
project for founding a philosophical journal, about which he
had been conducting an earnest correspondence with Bauer,
than with the prospect of a lectureship at Bonn. But he was
not yet willing to give up hope of overcoming the obstacles and
being able to teach at Bonn by his friend’s side.
42 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
On March 30, 1841, he received his leaving-certificate from
Berlin University. On April 6 he sent to Jena a dissertation
on ‘The difference between the natural philosophies of Demo-
crites and the Epicureans. 5 Certain negotiations appear to
have preceded this step. The University of Jena was cele-
brated at the time for the readiness with which it granted
doctor’s degrees. It lived up to its reputation. A week later
the dean of Jena University presented the candidate Karl
Heinrich Marx to the faculty of philosophy. The diploma was
dated April 15. Marx’s official student years were at an end.
CHAPTER V
PHILOSOPHY UNDER CENSORSHIP
The whole of the politics of an absolute state are embodied in
the person of the reigning monarch. The more flagrantly his
policy contradicts the interests of the classes excluded from
government, the more conscious they are of their impotence to
break their ruler’s power, the more longingly they direct their
gaze towards the heir to the throne. Upon him they rely for
the fulfilment of all their hopes. With him, or so they whisper
to themselves, the great new era will begin. The greater their
expectations, the more bitter their disappointment when the
new regime turns out to be nothing but a bare sequel of the old.
As Crown Prince Frederick Wilhelm IV had been the hope
of many. They had taken seriously the high-sounding phrases
concerning liberty and national unity that had flowed so easily
from his lips, however vague and indefinite the phrases had
been. They had expected that when once he was king the era
of long-demanded reforms would open. When he ascended
the throne new political life awakened on every side, and
everyone sent him petitions and demands, expecting them to
be fulfilled overnight. ‘An Augustan age was to begin for
Prussia. Everywhere new, fresh forces seemed to be arising;
there was germinating and sprouting, and everywhere long-
closed buds seemed to be opening in the warm light of the
newly arisen sun. A breath of spring went out from Berlin
and seemed to spread throughout the Fatherland.’
The romantic, pious, waywardly intellectual king fulfilled
none of the many expectations that were centred uppn him.
He had proclaimed that there must be freedom of speech, but
the new instructions issued to the censor’s office provided for
no alleviation of his severity. Things remained as they had
been before. It was a time when freeing the individual from
his traditional ties was the vogue. People’s minds were much
occupied with the problem of divorce, but the Government
settled the matter in its own inimitable way and decided for the
status quo .
43
44 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
The Left Hegelians had had but little faith in the Crown
Prince, but even they had not been entirely without hope, as
Koppen’s writings show. When he became king they w&re
quickly disillusioned. The first blow struck by the new regime
fell upon their shoulders. Frederick William IV was a personal
friend of Savigny, and Savigny strengthened him in his resolve
once and for all to exterminate the godless forces of Hegelian-
ism. He summoned the philosopher Schelling from Munich
to Berlin to enable him at last to bring out into the light of day
his long-prepared philosophical system, which was but a meta-
physical justification of the police state. When the Hegelians
tried to combat him the censor suppressed their literary
opposition just as ruthlessly as he had done in the past; and
thus the men who still to an extent believed that the battle
could be fought out on the peaceful plain of theory were driven
a stage farther into ‘practice , 5 and ‘direct participation in life . 5
To the Hegelians the dismissal of Bruno Bauer was a still
severer blow. To Marx the blow was a personal one. All the
plans he had made in his last years at Berlin had been closely
bound up with Bruno Bauer. They had wanted to teach
together at Bonn, they had wanted to be joint editors of The
Archives of Atheism , they had intended to do battle together
against the enemies of Hegelianism. It was for this reason
that Bauer had urged his friend to join him at Bonn at the
earliest possible moment. The end of Marx’s studies made
the proposition a practical one for the first time, but circum-
stances intervened to make it impossible.
The University of Bonn had two theological schools, Protes-
tant and Catholic, and they had always been bitterly opposed.
Each was always ready to go to the assistance of the enemy of
the other. The Catholics always supported the not completely
orthodox Protestants and the Protestants always rallied behind
the Liberal Catholics. Bruno Bauer counted on this. Between
the pair of hostile brothers he hoped to find space for his
critical annihilation of Christianity. He was disappointed.
Catholics and Protestants forgot their ancient feud and united
against their common foe. Pious students, incited by their
teachers, declined as future ministers of religion to go on
listening to the heresies of the ‘atheist 5 lecturer. A Catholic-
Pro testant United Front, created specially for the purpose,
PHILOSOPHY UNDER CENSORSHIP 45
started making hostile demonstrations against him, free fights
broke out at lectures, and the university authorities strove to
get rid of the disturber of their peace, whom the Ministry of
Public Worship and Education had foisted upon them because
it wanted him out of Berlin.
In the meantime Bauer’s standing with the Ministry had also
been seriously impaired. The department had been purged of
its last pro-Hegelians. In April, 1841, when Bauer’s Criticism
of the Synoptic Gospels appeared, Eichhorn, the Minister, had
inquired in Bonn whether it would not be possible to withdraw
his right to lecture. But as long as Bauer refrained from
political allusions in the lecture-room it was difficult to take
any active steps against him without tearing the last shreds
from the pretence of academic freedom.
The Government found their long-awaited opportunity in
the autumn of 1841. Bauer tied the rope round his own neck
by taking part in the demonstrations that took place in Berlin
in honour of Welcker, who was a professor at Karlsruhe and
leader of the opposition in the Parliament of Baden. Welcker’s
journey through Prussia was the signal for an extraordinary
outburst of enthusiasm. The Government well knew that the
banquets and ‘serenades’ of which he was the occasion were
not in honour of him personally, but in honour of the cause he
represented; i.e. constitutional government and the struggle
against autocracy. The Berlin celebrations were organised by
Bauer’s friends, and Bauer was in Berlin at the time. In his
speech at a banquet held on September 28 he drew a contrast
between the Hegelian conception of the reasonable state,
consciously understanding its tasks, and the vague spirit of
South-German Liberalism.
The sensation caused by the demonstrations in Welcker’s
honour, and more particularly by Bauer’s speech, was extra-
ordinary. It was talked about for days. The police busied
themselves with the ‘scandalous’ affair and the king ordered a
detailed report to be made to him. On October 14, after
reading the report, he wrote a letter to the Minister for Foreign
Affairs, insisting that the organisers of the affair be sought out
and removed from Berlin, or at least placed under rigorous
police supervision. On no account must Bauer be allowed to
continue lecturing at Bonn.
46 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
The king’s letter did its work. Throughout the winter one
report was written after another, the affair was exhaustively
discussed in the Press, all the universities in Prussia were con-
sulted, and eventually, on March 22, the verdict the king
wanted was delivered. Bruno Bauer left the University of
Bonn in May, 1842.
Marx followed Bauer’s struggle in Bonn with extreme
attention, for his own destiny was at stake beside his friend’s.
If Bauer had to leave the university, an academic career
was closed to him as long as Prussia remained the bigoted,
reactionary State that it was.
After leaving Berlin University Marx lived partly at Trier,
partly at Cologne, partly at Bonn. Only one of his literary
plans was realised. The ever-increasing severity of the censor-
ship made it impossible even to think of founding an atheistic
periodical. But Bauer’s Posaune des Jiingsten Gerichts iiber Hegel
den Atheisten und Antichristen did appear and Marx collaborated
in it. It appeared anonymously. The writer gave himself out
to be a right-thinking Christian and proceeded to demonstrate
that the most dangerous enemy of the Christian State was
Hegel, because he demolished it from within; and by Hegel he
meant Hegel, and not Hegel as interpreted by his misguided
pupils; Hegel who had so long passed as a column of the
existing order. The deception was so well carried out that at
first even men like Arnold Ruge took it for the real thing.
The cat was only let out of the bag by that section of the Press
which was friendly to the Hegelians. Every peasant , 1 one paper
wrote plainly enough, would understand that the book had
not been written by a religious man at all but by an artful
rebel. Marx prepared a sequel intended to demonstrate the
revolutionary element in Hegel’s art teaching. But the censor
made it impossible to continue the series of pamphlets which
was planned.
The philosophers, whether they wanted it or not, found
themselves assailed on every side by the demands of practical,
everyday life. Marx went on working at his essay. He
wanted to publish it but it never appeared. He stopped, was
forced to stop work on it because everything else had become
overshadowed by the importance of the plain, practical,
1 The German for peasant is Bauer.
PHILOSOPHY UNDER CENSORSHIP 47
political task of coming to grips with the enemy. Marx’s essay,
‘Remarks on the New Prussian Censorship,’ written in January
and February, 1842, the deadliest attack ever made, the
sharpest blow ever struck at the brazen profanity of arbitrary
despotism, was intended for Ruge’s Deutsche Jahrbiicher but only
appeared a year later in the Anekdota zur Neuesten Deutschen
Philosophic und Publizistik , which was published in Switzerland.
In April, 1842, Marx went to Bonn, where Bauer’s fate had
already been decided. ‘Irritating the devout,’ shocking the
philistine, bursting into peals of laughter in the deadly religious
silence, gave them a pleasure which there was now less reason
than ever to restrain. Bauer wrote mockingly about it to his
brother. He described how he and Marx one day infuriated
the excellent citizens of Bonn by appearing in a donkey-cart
while everybody was going for a walk. ‘The citizens of Bonn
looked at us in amazement. We were delighted, and the
donkeys brayed.’
In Bonn Marx wrote his first article for the Rheinische
Zeitung , which had been appearing in Cologne since January 1,
1842.
The Rhine Province was economically and politically the
most advanced part of Prussia, and its centre was Cologne. In
no other part of Germany had industry developed so rapidly
or was modern commerce so disseminated. Consciousness of
the anachronism of the feudal state developed sooner and more
powerfully here than elsewhere among the confident young
bourgeoisie. Their economic demands struck everywhere on
political impediments, and they recognised comparatively early
that these impediments must be removed. If there were no
other way, an end must be put to them by force. They
required the unity of Germany, which was carved up into
six-and-thirty ‘Fatherlands’ — big, medium, small and pigmy
states, each with its own coinage, its own weights and measures,
its own Customs. Political freedom, the overthrow of the many
petty potentates, the unification of Germany into a single big
economic unit was their necessary aim.
The centre of the Rhine Province was Cologne, where most
of the modern industrial undertakings had their headquarters.
The most energetic and progressive representatives of the new
world which repudiated Old Prussia and was hated by it in
48 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
turn lived there. Cologne was the headquarters of the young
intelligentsia arising with and in the midst of the new economic
order.
In the course of 1841 a number of young writers, philoso-
phers, merchants and industrialists had gathered into a small,
loosely knit group in Cologne. Camphausen, Mevissen and
other future captains of industry belonged to it, besides repre-
sentatives of the new intelligentsia such as Georg Jung, a
member of a rich Dutch family, whose wife was the daughter
of a Cologne banker, and Dagobert Oppenheim, brother of
the proprietor of the big banking house of Oppenheim and Co.;
and writers such as Moses Hess, who was a gifted and versatile
man, if too volatile and unstable to make real contributions to
the many branches of knowledge he wished to make his own.
Marx made a tremendous impression on the members of this
group when he met them for the first time. This was appar-
ently in July, 1841, when he was on his way from Trier to
Bonn. Jung spoke of Marx as being ‘a quite desperate revolu-
tionary 5 and having ‘one of the acutest minds’ he knew. In
September, 1841, Moses Hess wrote a letter to Berthold Auer-
bach which was a positive panegyric of Marx. ‘You will be
delighted to meet a man who is one of our friends here now,
though he lives in Bonn, where he will soon be a lecturer, 5 he
wrote. ‘He is a phenomenon who has made a tremendous
impression on me, though my interests lie in an entirely
different field. In short, you can definitely look forward to
meeting the greatest, perhaps the only real philosopher now
living. Soon, when he makes his debut (as a writer as well as
in an academic chair) he will draw the eyes of all Germany
upon himself. Dr. Marx, as my idol is called — he is still a
young man (he is at most twenty-four years old) — will give
mediaeval religion and philosophy their last push. He com-
bines the most profound philosophical earnestness with the
most biting wit. Think of Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach,
Lessing, Heine and Hegel fused into one — I say fused , not just
lumped together — and you have Dr. Marx.’
About this time the Cologne group conceived the project of
having a daily paper of their own. Conditions were favourable.
Antagonism between Protestant Prussia and the Catholic
Rhineland had scarcely diminished during the bare three
PHILOSOPHY UNDER CENSORSHIP 49
decades of their amalgamation. In the course of the thirties
Church and State had come into a whole series of conflicts,
which were liable to flare up again at any moment. Since the
revolutionary upheaval by which the Catholics of Belgium had
secured their independence from Protestant Holland, an
example that militant sections of the clerical circles in the
Rhineland occasionally felt tempted to imitate, the danger
inherent in these conflicts was all the greater. The old and
widely circulated Kolniscke £eitmg propagated the Catholic
cause with great skill. The Government tried to counter it
with a paper of its own, the Rkeinische Allgemeine fitting, which
was started in 1841. It met with little success. It was too
feeble in every way to compete with the ably conducted
Kolnische Zeitung.
The Cologne group decided to take the paper over. The
response to the appeal to take up shares in the new under-
taking far surpassed expectations. Thirty thousand thalers
were subscribed in a short time. In those days that was a very
respectable sum of money. Every section of the public having
Left sympathies of any kind was represented among the sub-
scribers. As a token of the interest the Government took in an
anti-ultramontane organ, even Gerlach, the president of the
local administration, was among the shareholders.
The paper did not immediately find its political line. The
first editor was intended to have been Friedrich List, whose
National System of Political Economy had just appeared. In the
field of economic theory, List was the first spokesman on behalf
of the young bourgeoisie’s aspirations for the protection and
advancement of industry in an economically independent
Germany. But List was ill and recommended Dr. Gustav
Hofken, one of his disciples, to fill his place. The first number
appeared on January 1, 1842. Hofken’s policy was $pr the ex-
pansion of the German Zollverein, the development of German
trade and trade policy, and the liberation of the German
consciousness from everything that hampered unity. This did
not satisfy the paper’s new proprietors. They all belonged to
the prosperous and educated bourgeoisie. On the board of
directors Rudolf Schramm, the manufacturer’s son, sat side by
side with wealthy lawyers and doctors. The chief shareholders
were leading Cologne industrialists, the most important being
4
50 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
Ludolf Camphausen, later Prime Minister of Prussia, one of
the pioneers of the railway in Germany. It had long been clear
to them that their economic programme could not be realised
without a fundamental reorganisation of the state. Jung and
Oppenheim, the two managers, were Young Hegelians and
helped Hess, who was closely associated with the editorial
control from the beginning, in finding Young Hegelians to
work for the paper. Variances arose with Hofken and on
January 18 he resigned.
Marx already had considerable influence upon the manage-
ment, especially upon Jung, and it was on his recommendation
that his old friend Rutenberg was appointed editor, a position
for which he soon proved utterly unsuitable. He could write
Young Hegelian articles, but he was simply not equipped for
the task of controlling a great political newspaper, which was
what the Rheinische £eitung was increasingly becoming every
day. From the middle of February onwards the real editor
was Moses Hess.
Changes of editorship did not impede the paper’s expansion.
Its circulation doubled in the first month and went on
increasing steadily.
Close as Marx’s connection with the paper was from its first
day of publication, for the first three months he did not work
for it. He wrote nothing for it until after Bauer’s dismissal,
when all prospect of an academic career had vanished. The
first articles he wrote were a series about the debates in the
sixth Rhenish Diet on the freedom of the Press, and the first of
the series appeared on May 5, 1842. This was the first work
of Marx’s to be printed, if one excepts the two poems his friends
published, possibly against his will, in the Athenaum . Georg
Jung thought the article ‘exceptionally good.’ Arnold Ruge
called it ^in short, the best that has ever been written about the
freedom of the Press.’ Ludolf Camphausen inquired of his
brother who the writer of the ‘admirable’ article might be.
(Marx did not sign it, but called it ‘by a Rhinelander.’)
Extracts were quoted everywhere, and earned the Rheinische
J^eitung such credit that Marx was promptly asked to send in as
many more articles as he could as quickly as he could write
them. Marx wrote three more articles in the course of the
summer, one of which was suppressed by the censor and the
PHILOSOPHY UNDER CENSORSHIP 51
other heavily blue-pencilled. In the middle of October Marx
was sent for to Cologne. On October 15 he took over the,
editorship of the Rheinische Zjeitung.
In spite of all the determination with which Marx fought
against feudal absolutism and rejected half-solutions and
illusory ones — in a letter to Ruge he described constitutional
monarchy as ‘a mongrel riddled with contradiction and para-
dox’ — he was soon forced to part from his Berlin friends. They
went on with their ‘absolute criticism/ completely untroubled
as to whether it were possible or justified in the concrete
circumstances in which they found themselves. A dispute that
arose between him and Edgar Bauer is illuminating. In some
essays he sent to Marx Edgar Bauer criticised the principle of
compromise in political matters. Not satisfied with that, he
made a most violent attack on all who were unwilling in
practice to make his uncompromising critical attitude their
own. Marx, in a letter to Oppenheim, emphatically repudi-
ated this species of pseudo-radicalism. He described Bauer’s
articles as ‘quite general theoretical discussions concerning the
constitution of the state, suitable rather for a scientific journal
than for a newspaper/ and drew a picture of ‘liberal-minded,
practical men, who have undertaken the troublesome role of
struggling step-by-step for freedom within constitutional limits.’
Marx’s constant regard for the concrete facts led him to
taking an interest in social problems. At the time the German
Press was paying particular attention to the Chartist move-
ment in England and the Communist aspirations in France
and Switzerland. The Rheinische fitting took up these ques-
tions and printed articles by Hess about the Communists and
by Von Mevissen, who had just returned to Cologne from
England, about the Chartists. In August, 1842, the manage-
ment of the Rheinische ^eitung and those associated with them
formed a study-circle for the discussion of social problems.
Marx took part in it himself. At the beginning of October
he defended his paper against a charge of Communism. The
article he wrote demonstrates how slight Marx’s knowledge of
social problems still was in 1842. He was still under the
influence of ideas recently elaborated by Hess, Hess was the
first of the Young Hegelian camp to turn his attention to
Communism, and Engels says that he was the first of the three
52 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
of them to come over to Communism. What Marx intended
to write was a ‘fundamental critique of Communism 5 based on
‘a long-continued and thorough study.’ He read the works of
the French Socialists and Communists who were the chief
authorities on the subject at the time — Proudhon’s Qji’est ce que
la Propriety?, Dezamy’s Calomnie et Politique de M. Cabet ,’ Leroux,
Consid^rant, and others.
However important social questions may have been, there
were immediate political problems to solve. In all these Marx
shared the views of the other Left Hegelians, and his method
was theirs. His position was at the extreme Left wing of
bourgeois democracy. He was, to repeat the phrase, a
‘desperate revolutionary.’ A clean sweep must be made of
things as they were — but for the time being in the domain of
theory only. Victory in the intellectual sphere must precede
victory in the world of reality — how, was uncertain, the path
to it was not yet visible. Marx, in spite of some vacillation
and changes of mind, clung as long as possible to the hope of
being able to convince the rulers of the necessity of funda-
mental changes. Should their efforts prove in vain there was
but one alternative and that was revolution, the threat of
which appears in his writings at this period from time to time.
When the ruling powers called on divine inspiration for their
defence, Marx replied that English history had sufficiently
demonstrated that the conception of divine inspiration from
above called forth the counter-conception of divine inspiration
from below. ‘Charles I mounted the scaffold because of divine
inspiration from below.’ The threat was there plainly enough;
but it was held in abeyance, only to apply if all efforts to gain
the victory in the intellectual sphere should fail. It was their
task to persevere tirelessly with these efforts.
The new newspaper was at first not unwelcome to the
Government. Upholding the idea of national unity in opposi-
tion to the narrow frontiers of provincialism, it stood by
implication for Prussian hegemony in Germany, set its face
against ultramontanism and state interference in Church
matters, all by virtue of its programme of freeing the national
consciousness of everything that hampered the sense of unity.
But even before Marx took over control of the paper it had
come into ever-growing conflict with the Government. As
PHILOSOPHY UNDER CENSORSHIP 53
early as July Marx wrote to Ruge that the ‘greatest obduracy 5
was required to see a paper like the Rheinische £eitung through.
It was censored with ‘the most stern and unjust rigour. 5 The
more it criticised the autocracy, the bureaucracy, the censor-
ship, the whole system of the Christian-German Reaction, the
harder did the Government bear down upon it. If at first it
had been a welcome ally against the Kolnische £eitung y its tone
very soon became ‘even more doubtful 5 than that of the
Kolnische %eitung. In the last resort it was possible, if not easy,
to come to terms with the Catholic Reaction. With the spirit
of Liberalism, whose banner was flown more flagrantly in the
Rheinische fitting every day, it was out of the question.
* Marx directed its policy far more clearly, more purposefully,
more single-mindedly, launched it against the innermost
chamber of the Old Prussian State. Under his direction the
paper made extraordinarily rapid strides. When he took it
over it had about one thousand subscribers. On January 1,
1843, the number had increased to three thousand. Very few
German papers could boast as many. It was more widely
quoted than all the others, and to write for it was considered
a high honour. Letters, articles, poems were sent to it from
all parts of Germany. Marx edited it as he had wanted it to
be edited when he contributed to it from Bonn. It was essen-
tial, he had written to Oppenheim from Bonn, that the
Rheinische fitting should not be directed by its contributors
but that the contributors should be directed by it. He was, as
friend and foe soon saw, ‘the source from which the doctrine
flowed. 5 He concerned himself with every detail. The paper
was, as it were, fused all of a piece. Marx himself selected the
articles and edited them. Traces of his powerful hand are
perceptible in the paper’s tone, its style, even in its punctuation.
But this meant that Marx was brought up against the hard
facts of reality more sharply than ever. The Prussian State as
it actually was could still be measured against the idea of what
the true state ought to be. But there was no answer in Hegel
to economic questions such as that raised by the debates in the
Diet about the wood-theft law or the distress among the wine-
growing peasants of the Moselle. Engels wrote later that
‘Marx always said that it was his going into the question of the
wood-theft law and the position of the Moselle peasants that
54 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
turned his attention from pure politics to economic conditions
and thus to Socialism. 9
The more deeply Marx plunged into reality, the more his
Berlin friends lost themselves in abstraction. Their criticism
became ever more 'absolute, 9 and was destined to end up in
empty negation. It became 'nihilistic. 9
The word 'nihilism, 9 which dates from those times, was
coined for them. The Russian writer, Turgeniev, who is
generally supposed to have invented it, learned it during this
period in Berlin, when he met members of Bruno Bauer’s
circle. He transferred it to the Russian revolutionaries twenty
years later.
Berlin ‘nihilism 9 took delight in an occasionally absurd
ridiculing of philistinism, and the so-called ‘Freien, 9 or ‘Free, 9
demonstrated their emancipation by an anti-philistinism which
in practice tied them to that very world which they so radically
repudiated, and rendered them incapable of genuinely com-
bating it. Their emancipation ended up in sheer buffoonery.
Marx’s unwillingness to place the Rheinische fyitmg at the
disposal of their antics brought their violent wrath down upon
his head. The final breach came on account of Herwegh.
Georgh Herwegh’s poems, Gedichte eines Lebendigen , had
made him the most popular poet in Germany. They expressed
incomparably all the vague, sentimental, often naive longing
for liberty that was rife in German society at the time. Her-
wegh had been forced to seek refuge abroad. He was able to
return to Germany in 1842, and his return developed into a
triumphal progress. Herwegh, who was a quite unpolitical
poet at heart, was so feted and honoured that he ended by
completely losing all sense of proportion. At Berlin he was
invited to see the king. Frederick William IV liked assuming
a popular role and courting popularity, and on his side Her-
wegh felt flattered by the role of Marquis Posa which he hoped
to play before the king. The interview, however, gave satis-
faction to neither party. Each felt the falseness of his position,
and when the Press started discussing this curious audience
each party behaved as if the other had come off worse. The
extreme Left took Herwegh’s audience especially amiss, and
his meeting with Bruno Bauer’s group ended in an abrupt
breach. Herwegh wrote a letter to the editor of the Rheinische
PHILOSOPHY UNDER CENSORSHIP 55
%eitung about the ‘Freien.’ He skated quickly over the occasion
of his own quarrel with them and attacked them on quite
general grounds. ‘They compromise our cause and our Party
with their revolutionary romanticism, their longing to be
geniuses and their big talk,’ he said.
Marx was anything but pleased at receiving Herwegh’s
letter, but his opinion of the ‘Freien’ coincided with Herwegh’s.
He was forced to defend Herwegh against the attacks made
upon him from Berlin. They demanded that the Rheinische
Zeitung print their anti-Herwegh articles, but Marx refused.
They sent him an ultimatum, which Marx declined. The
Berliners broke off relations with Marx and the Rheinische
Zcitung. This was Marx’s first rupture with the ultra-Lefts.
The paper lost little because of the ‘Freien.’ Its reputation
was growing steadily, its circulation was increasing, and it
was on the way to becoming the leading paper in Germany,
when the censorship suddenly gave it its death-blow.
As early as the days of Rutenberg’s editorship the Govern-
ment had regretted the good-will they had shown the Rheinische
Zcitung. In February, 1842, inquiries were made in official
circles in the Rhineland as to whether it might not be advisable
to withdraw its licence. This danger was at first averted
because, though the local officials took exception to a great
deal in the paper, they were unwilling to lose an ally against
their hereditary clerical foes. But the censorship became more
rigorous. It was in the hands of the ‘shameless’ Dolleschall,
the dull-witted official who had forbidden ‘making a comedy
of divine things.’ What he understood he blue-pencilled with-
out rhyme or reason, and he was even more rigorous with what
he did not understand, because that he regarded as particularly
suspicious. But it was impossible to blue-pencil everything.
So much that was subversive remained that th<s Berlin
authorities recognised the insufficiency of their previous
instructions. New and even more rigorous instructions were
sent the censor. Marx was for a long time fond of quoting one
saying of Dolleschall’s: ‘Now my living’s at stake. I’ll cross
everything out!’ It made no difference. Dolleschall was re-
called and a new and more severe censor came and ruled in
his stead. It was not long before the newcomer was repri-
manded for excessive leniency. This hurt his feelijigs^greatly,
56 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
and he defended himself. He had suppressed no fewer than
a hundred and forty articles, but he received no mercy because
of that. The censor was given a super-censor to sit by his side,
so that one should blue-pencil what the other left. Even this
did not suffice. In December the Berlin authorities sent a
special envoy to the Rhineland to inquire how the population
would take it if the paper were suppressed or whether sup-
pression would cause too much dissatisfaction. The paper’s
reputation had grown to such an extent that the Government
shrank from taking the final step. But it was only a question
of time.
Though the order came from Berlin, it was the Tsar,
Nicholas I, who really suppressed the Rheinische fitting. On
January 4 the Rheinische ^eitung published a violent anti-
Russian article. Russia was the prop of Prussian foreign policy.
It was an alliance in which Russia gave the orders and Prussia
listened and obeyed. The Tsar saw to it that Prussia did not
deviate from the straight and narrow path. When Frederick
William IV ascended the throne and there were murmurs here
and there in the Prussian Press to the effect that perhaps this
Russian hegemony over a German State was not entirely in
order, Nicholas I was filled with righteous indignation. He read
the submissive young king a lecture and did not shrink from giv-
ing his very plain opinion as to how Prussia ought to be ruled.
The Prussian ambassador at the court of St. Petersburg had
repeatedly to listen to hard words. On January 10 he reported
to Berlin another and if possible a more violent outburst of
imperial rage. Nicholas I had engaged Herr von Liebermann
in conversation at the ball at the Winter Palace on January 8
and said that he found the Liberal German Press infamous
beyond all measure, and he could not sufficiently express his
astonishment at the reception the king had given the notorious
Herwegh. His Imperial Majesty spoke so violently and with
such a flood of words that the ambassador was unable to say
anything at all. Moreover, the Tsar had already written
Frederick William IV a personal letter. His rebukes became
so trenchant and so threatening that Berlin became alarmed.
The anti-Russian article had been read with indignation
in Berlin two weeks before the ambassador’s report arrived
from St. Petersburg. This time there was no more hesitation.
PHILOSOPHY UNDER CENSORSHIP 57
On January 21, 1843, the three Prussian ministers concerned
with the censorship decided to suspend the Rheinische %eitung.
The Government were in such a hurry that they sent a special
mounted messenger to Cologne. According to the edict which
he carried the newspaper had been guilty of malicious slander
of the State authorities, especially the censorship department;
it had held up the administration of the Press police in Prussia
to contempt and offended friendly foreign Powers. In order
not excessively to damage the shareholders and subscribers,
the paper was to be allowed to continue until March 31, but
would be subject to special censorship to prevent it from erring
during the course of the reprieve.
A clever, cultured cynic, named Wilhelm Saint-Paul, came
to Cologne as the last censor. In his reports on Marx he
called him the living source and fountain-head of the paper’s
views. He had made Marx’s acquaintance, and he was a
man ‘who would die for his ideas.’ Another time he wrote
that certain as it was that the views of Dr. Marx rested upon
a profound speculative error, as he had tried to prove to him,
Dr. Marx was equally certain of the rightness of his views.
‘The contributors to the Rheinische J^eitung could be accused of
anything rather than lack of principle in that sense. This can
only be one more reason,’ Saint-Paul concluded with shame-
less logic, ‘for removing him, in the event of the paper being
allowed to continue, from a position of direct and controlling
influence.’
The fear that the ban would rouse ill-feeling turned out to
be well founded. In every town of the province, in Cologne,
Aachen, Elberfeld, Dtisseldorf, Coblenz and Trier, hundreds
of respectable citizens signed petitions to the Government,
appealing for the lifting of the ban. The whole of the German
Press took up the question of the suspension of the Jtheinische
£eitung. The authorities in Berlin actually hesitated as to
whether it might not be advisable to allow the paper to reappear
under definite restrictions.
But in the last resort the Berlin Government regarded the
good-will of the Tsar as more important than the temper of
the Rhinelanders. On February 7 the ambassador in St.
Petersburg wrote another report:
‘ Depuis V expedition de mon dernier tres- humble rapport, fai eu aussi
58 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
occasion de rencontrer Mr. le Comte de Nesselrode , dans le salon de son
Spouse , et de lui parler; mats au lieu de me four nir des renseignements
qui auraient pu m? Stre utiles , ou interessants , sous le rapport de la
politique Mr, le Vice-Chancelier a saisi cette occasion pour me de-
mander: si f avals lu deja V article veritablement infame , que la gazette
Rh&iane, publiee a Cologne avait land dernihement contre le Cabinet
Russe , — en basant ses declamations furibondes sur le faux pritexte
d 9 une note qui rrdaurait etc adressee par lui, relativement a la tendance
de la presse Allemande, J’ai repondu a Mr, le Comte de Nesselrode ,
que je ne connaissais pas textuellement cet article, mais que je me
rappelais fort bien , que la gazette d’Etat avait publii, il rCy a pas
longtems, une refutation de quelques articles semblables , en diclarant
brievement ; mais assez positivement, que les suppositions sur lesquelles
le raisonnement de ces articles avait ete base, manquaient de fondement
et de tout motif raisonnable. Cette refutation n'etait point inconnue
a Mr. le Vice-Chancelier; mais il m'a avvue, qu elle ne suffisait pas ,
pour luifaire comprendre, comment un censeur employe par le gouverne -
ment de Votre Majeste avait pu laisser passer un article d'une nature
semblable, qui, selon lui, surpassait encore de beaucoup, en perfidie et
en violence , tout ce qui avait ete publiS jus quid dans les feuilles
Prussiennes contre le gouvernement Imperial. Il y a ajoute encore
qu’afin que je puisse en juger pour moi-meme, en toute connaissance de
cause, il m'enverait la feuille de la gazette Rhenanc, qui renfermait
V article en question, et il V a fait, en effet, encore le mime soir. — Je
suis done veritablement heureux d' avoir trouve, cette nuit, en revenant
du bal patriotique, dans le numero de la gazette d’Etat du <$i.janvier,
qui venait d'arriver par la poste, llordre emane tout recemment des
trois Minis teres de Votre Majeste qui president aux affaires de censure ,
et en vertu duquel la gazette Rhenane doit cesser de paraitre d dater
du 1. avril prochain! Aussi me ferai-je un devoir des plus empresses
de faire valoir cette mesure energique aupres de Mr. le Comte de Nessel-
rode aujovxd'hui meme d Voccasion d'un diner auquel il rrda engage .
Je crois, du reste, devoir faire observer encore tres-humblement d ce
sujet, que lors de la conversation que j'ai eu, avant-hier, avec Mr. le
Vice-Chancelier, il m! avait tres expressement assure, que VEmpereur
ne connaissait probablement pas encore V article en question parce que,
pour sa part, il avait hesiti jusqu'ici d le placer sous les yeux de Sa
Majesti Imperialel 1
1 Since submitting my last humble report I have had the opportunity of meeting
Count de Nesselrode at his wife’s salon and of conversing with him. Instead of
PHILOSOPHY UNDER CENSORSHIP 59
The Prussian Government trembled at the thought that the
infamous article might yet come to the eyes of the Tsar. It
was decided definitely that the ban should remain. A deputa-
tion of shareholders was not even received. Marx, in ignorance
of the true ground for the suspension of the paper (which as
a matter of fact, has remained unknown to historians to this
day) made a last desperate move. An article, inspired by him,
appeared in the Mannheimer Abendzeitung attributing the whole
of the blame to him. It was he who had given the paper its
distinguishing tone, he was its evil spirit, its controversialist
par excellence , and it was his audacious insolence and youthful
indiscretion that were to blame. But that made no difference
either. The issue of March 18 contained the following: ‘The
undersigned announces that he has retired from the editorship
of the Rheiniscke fettling because of the present censorship
conditions. Dr. Marx. 5 But still there was no act of
clemency.
The last number of the Rheiniscke fitting appeared on
March 31. It was so sought after that as much as from eight
to ten silver groschen were paid for a copy. The Rheiniscke
Zeitung took its departure with a poem:
giving me information which might have been useful or interesting to me in
connection with the general political situation, the Vice-Chancellor used the
occasion to ask me whether I had read the really infamous attack which the
Rheiniscke g^eiturig, published at Cologne, had recently made on the Russian
Cabinet, basing its furious denunciations on the false pretext of a note said to have
been addressed to me by him relative to the tendencies of the German Press.
I replied that I was not acquainted with the text of the particular article but I
recollected well that the State Gazette had recently published a refutation of some
similar articles, declaring, briefly but quite categorically, that the assumptions on
which those articles were based were entirely without foundation or reasonable
cause. This refutation was certainly not unknown to the Vice-Chancellor; but
he confessed to me that he was unable to understand how a censor employed by
Your Majesty’s Government could have passed an article of such a nature. In
his opinion it far surpassed in perfidy and violence all previous attacks made on the
Imperial Government in the Prussian Press. He added that in order that I might
judge for myself and be fully acquainted with the facts he would send ftie a copy
of the Rheiniscke Zjeitung containing the article in question, which he did the same
evening. Consequently I am very gratified to-night, on returning from the
Patriotic Ball, to find in the State Gazette for January 31, which has just arrived by
post, that Your Majesty’s three ministers in charge of the censorship have recently
issued an order by virtue of which the Rheinische Zeitung will cease to appear as
from April 1. I shall make it my most immediate duty to draw Count de
Nesselrode’s attention to this energetic measure to-day on the occasion of a dinner
to which he has invited me. I believe it to be my duty very humbly to add that
during my conversation with the Vice-Chancellor the day before yesterday he
assured me definitely that in all probability the Emperor has not yet seen the
article in question, because he on his part had hesitated to lay it before His
Imperial Majesty’s eyes.
6o
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Wir liessen kuhn der Freiheit Fahne wehen
Und ernst tat jeder Schijfmann seine Pflicht ,
War d'rum vergebens auch der Mannschaft Spahen:
Die Fahrt war schon und sie gereut uns nicht,
Dass uns der Cotter £orn hat nachgetrachtet
Es schreckt uns nicht , dass unser Mast gefdllt .
Denn auch Kolumbus ward zuerst verachtet
Und endlich sah er doch die neue Welt .
Ihr Freunde , deren Beifall uns geworden,
Ihr Gegner , die ihr uns mit Kampf geehrt ,
Wir seh'n uns wieder einst an neuen Borden ,
Wenn Alles bricht , der Mut bleibt unversehrt . 1
1 We boldly flew the flag of freedom, and every member of the crew did his
duty. In spite of the watch having been kept in vain, the voyage was good and
we do not regret it. Though the gods were angry, though our mast fell, we were
not intimidated. Columbus himself was despised at first, but he looked upon the
New World at last. Friends who applauded us, foes who fought us, we shall
meet again on the new shore. If all collapses, courage remains unbroken.
CHAPTER VI
THE GERMANS LEARN FRENCH
Though the final impulse that led to the suppression of the
Rheiniscke filling came from the Tsar, even if it had refrained
from commenting on foreign politics it would inevitably have
been suppressed a few weeks later just the same. The Prussian
Government was determined to make an end of the radical
Press once and for all. At the end of 1 842 it forbade the circu-
lation in Prussia of the Leipziger Allgemeine fitting, which had
been a mouthpiece of the Left Hegelians for the past two
years under the editorship of Gustav Julius. At the beginning
of January, 1843, Frederick Wilhelm IV obtained from the
Government of Saxony the suspension in Dresden of Ruge’s
Deutsche Jahrbilcher . Soon afterwards Buhl’s Patriot was banned
in Berlin. The police and the censor forced the Konigsberger
Zeitung to sever its connection with the radicals. At the end
of January a decree withdrew all the concessions that had been
granted two years before.
The Left Hegelians had now lost all the literary positions
they had occupied at the beginning of the forties. They had
been worsted in the struggle for the transformation of the
State, for the remodelling into rational form of a world the
irrationality of which they had demonstrated. They had
fought with intellectual weapons only and had been defeated.
Old Prussia had not been able to answer their arguments.
Incapable of victory in the theoretical field, it had nevertheless
conquered in fact. Its weapons were the police, the censorship
and force. Against force, theory — theory, pure, unaided and
alone — had failed.
Journalism had been the only method of political activity
available, and now it had been taken away. No prospect of
the situation changing was in sight. Certainly there were
protests here and there, and in the Rhineland they were
stronger than elsewhere, but the overwhelming majority of the
population, the masses, looked upon the executioner of liberty
with indifference. Nothing was to be hoped for from the inert
61
62
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
multitude. Bruno Bauer and his followers turned into them-
selves and away from a reality that was so unreasonable. They
isolated themselves, spun a new theory out of their very
impotence, made a fetish of individual consciousness, which
they regarded as the only battlefield on which victories could
be fought and won, and ended up in an individual anarchism
which reached its zenith in Max Stirner’s ultra-radical and
ultra-harmless Einzigen.
Marx, Ruge, Hess, all who had not grown weary of the fray,
drew a different conclusion from defeat. The physical force
of the State had emerged victorious only because philosophy
had remained alone, had not been able to answer force with
force. One duty above all others was now incumbent upon
the philosophers — to find their way to the masses. In the spring
of 1843 Marx wrote that politics were the only ally with the
aid of which contemporary philosophy could become a reality.
At the end of that year he expressed the idea with which he,
far more than any of his colleagues, was impressed with in
the celebrated words: ‘The weapon of criticism can certainly
never be a substitute for the criticism of the weapon; physical
force must be overthrown with physical force; and theory will
be a physical force as soon as the masses understand it.’
To speak to the people and make them understand one must
talk to them freely. Immediately after the suppression of the
Rheinische Zeitung Marx decided to go abroad and continue
the struggle from there. Tt is unpleasant/ he wrote to Ruge
when the suppression was made public, ‘to perform menial
service even in the cause of freedom and to fight with needles
instead of with clubs. I have grown weary of hypocrisy,
stupidity, the exercise of brute force and bowing and cringing
and back-bending and verbal hair-splitting. The Government
has released me. ... In Germany there is now nothing I can
do. In Germany one can only be false to oneself.’
Marx’s first intention was to settle in Switzerland and work^
with Herwegh on the Deutsche Boten , which Herwegh edited
there. But Ruge invited his collaboration in bringing out the
suppressed Deutsche Jahrbiicher in another form abroad. He
held out to Marx the prospect of a fixed income of from five
hundred and fifty to six hundred thalers and about two
hundred and fifty thalers extra which could be earned by other
THE GERMANS LEARN FRENCH 63
writing. Thus, if all went well, he would have an income of
eight hundred and fifty thalers. This was more than Marx
could have hoped for, and he gladly accepted Ruge’s proposal,
‘Even if it had been possible to continue the Jahrbiicher , 5 he
wrote to Ruge in answer — Ruge had for a time been hesitating
as to whether it might not perhaps be better to stay on in
Dresden after all if the minister made concessions — ‘it would
at best be a feeble imitation of the “dear departed , 55 and that
would no longer be good enough. In comparison the Deutsche -
Franzosische Jahrbiicher would be an enterprise of high principle,
a thing of consequence, an undertaking to which one could
devote oneself with enthusiasm . 5 Ruge had considered whether
it might not be a good idea to make the proposed review one
of more than three hundred and twenty pages. Books of more
than three hundred and twenty pages were not subject to
censorship in Germany at the time. Marx rejected the idea.
Such books were not for the people. The most one dared offer
them was a monthly.
A monthly would be suitable for the problem which now had
to be solved; i.e. that of making contact with the masses. The
name that Marx chose, The German-French Year-Books , was an
indication of the intended contents. Ludwig Feuerbach had
urged that the philosopher who should identify himself with
life and mankind should be of Franco-German blood; his heart
French and his head German. The head reformed, the heart
revolutionised. For the German radicals the head meant
German philosophy. ‘We Germans are contemporary with
the times in philosophy without being contemporary with the
times in history . 5 The French were contemporary with the
times in history. Paris was the ‘new capital of the new world . 5
The review was intended to bring Germans and French, the
most advanced in theory and the most advanced in practice,
together into an ‘intellectual alliance . 5
Negotiations with Julius Frobel, the prospective publisher,
progressed favourably. Marx went to Dresden to make final
arrangements. It was impossible for the paper to appear in
Switzerland, which was becoming increasingly subservient to
orders from Berlin and had started expelling radicals and
banning newspapers and books. Brussels, or better still, Paris,
held out brighter prospects for the new venture. By the end
64 KARL MARX.* MAN AND FIGHTER
of May all arrangements were complete, and Marx was able
to realise his ‘private plans’ and marry.
‘As soon as we have signed the contract I shall go to Kreuz-
nach and get married, 5 he wrote to Ruge in March. ‘I can
assure you, without being at all romantic, that I am head-over-
heels in love. I have been engaged now for more than seven
years, and my fiancee has had to fight the hardest battles for
my sake, almost shattering her health in the process, partly
with her bigoted, aristocratic relations, whose twin objects of
worship are the “Lord in Heaven 55 and the “Lord in Berlin, 55
and partly with my own family, into the bosom of which some
priests and other enemies of mine have insinuated themselves.
For years my fiancee and I have had to engage in more un-
necessary and exhausting conflicts than many who are three
times as old as we and prate continually of their “experience
of life 55 (which is one of the favourite expressions in our home
circle) . 5
Since the death of Karl’s father there had been an element
of strain in Jenny’s relations with his family. The few letters
that survive from the years 1839 to 1843 do not cast a very
clear light on the reason. Karl’s mother complained in the
middle of 1840 that her son had become quite a stranger to
his family and wrote in her Dutch-German that he had
‘renounced everything which had formerly been valuable and
dear to him. 5 The Westphalen family took no notice of her,
humiliated her, annoyed her, behaved haughtily and distantly,
were eccentric, and ‘had no family feeling at all. 5 There was
much talk of a Herr Schlink, who somehow seems to have
encouraged these dissensions. What they were more particularly
about cannot now be discovered.
Marx had ‘fallen out with his family 5 since 1842. He told
Ruge that he had no claim to his father’s estate until after his
mother’s death. After his ‘failure 5 in his career as the editor
of a paper — according to all the well-disposed people whose
opinion his mother prized so highly the Rheinische Z e ^ un S w ^ s
a ‘fiasco 5 — his family put obstacles in his way and, although
they were comfortably off, he was left in most pressing financial
straits. His mother never became reconciled to him. She
refused to help him even during his years of acute distress in
London. When she died in 1863 Jenny wrote to Frau
THE GERMANS LEARN FRENCH 65
Liebknecht that it would be hypocrisy for her to say she
had been sentimental at the news of her mother-in-law’s
death.
As long as old Westphalen lived he held a protecting hand
over his daughter’s engagement to Karl. Hostilities only broke
out again after his death. True, no one raised objections to
Marx’s origin. Many years later, when Charles Longuet, in
an obituary on Frau Marx, mentioned racial prejudice as
having had to be overcome, Marx described it as ‘pure moon-
shine. 5 To Jenny’s relatives Marx seemed strange and hostile
not because of his racial antecedents but because he was a pupil
of Hegel, a follower of Feuerbach, a friend of the notorious
Bruno Bauer, the atheist. Jenny’s half-brother, Ferdinand,
was the leader of the religious opposition. Jenny despised him.
In her letters she never referred to him as her brother but as
the ‘Minister of State,’ the ‘Minister of the Interior’ and so on.
When her daughter Laura became engaged to Lafargue Jenny
Marx observed that their ‘agreement about fundamentals,
particularly in the religious respect,’ was ‘a singular piece of
good fortune.’ She added, thinking of her own youth, ‘And
so Laura will be protected from all the struggles and the
suffering inevitable for a girl with her opinions in the environ-
ment in which she is to live.’ Jenny Marx preserved a bitter
hatred of the ‘bigots’ for the whole of her life.
Though Jenny needed all her determination to overcome
the opposition, an open rupture with her family did not take
place. On June 13, 1843, there took place the marriage of
‘Herr Carl Marx, doctor of philosophy, resident in Cologne,
and of Fraulein Bertha Julia Jenny von Westphalen, no
occupation, resident in Kreuznach.’
The young couple spent the next few months at Frau von
Westphalen’s house at Kreuznach, where they had two visitors.
The first was Esser, a Revisionsrat and a friend of Karl’s father,
who had the naive effrontery to offer him work for the Govern-
ment which had just suppressed the Rheinische Zeitmg. The
attempt to buy him met with a point-blank rebuff.
At the end of July Ruge passed through Kreuznach, on
his way to Brussels to find out what prospects it offered for the
publication of his periodical. They did not turn out to be very
hopeful. The German colony in Brussels was small, and was
5
66
KARL MARX.* MAN AND FIGHTER
only moderately interested in philosophy and politics. Though
the Press enjoyed greater freedom in Belgium than in France,
intellectual life in Belgium, in so far as it could be called such,
was only a feeble echo of the French. Ruge went on to
Paris.
In the words of the young Engels, Paris was the place where
1 ‘European civilisation had reached its fullest bloom. 9 It was
the ‘nerve-centre of European history, sending out electric
shocks at regular intervals which galvanised the whole world. 9
The Bourgeois Kingdom was tottering. Ruge, accustomed
from Germany to detecting the slightest signs of opposition,
found the tension in the city very great. Guizot’s majority in
the Chamber had sunk to three. ‘The Bourgeois King’s loss
of prestige among the people is demonstrated by the many
attempts to assassinate that dynastic and autocratic prince. He
will not allow himself to be “hampered" in any way with the
promised “republican institutions.” One day when he dashed
by me in the Champs Elysees, well hidden in his coach, with
hussars in front and behind and on both sides, I observed to my
astonishment that the outriders had their guns cocked ready
to fire in earnest and not just in the usual burlesque style. Thus
did he ride by with his bad conscience! 9 France was the home
of revolution, and in France the inevitable new revolution
must start again. Everywhere that revolutionaries lived,
waiting impatiently for their hour to strike, they lived in
expectation of the ‘crowing of the Gallic cock. 9
At the end of October, 1843, Marx and his wife went to
Paris. Ruge and the publisher, Frobel, had already approached
the leading radicals and members of the Opposition with a
view to enlisting their support. The journal was intended to be
bilingual, the Germans writing in German and the Frenchmen
in French. Ruge’s opinion was that everybody could read
French, a view which accorded ill with the paper’s proposed
popular appeal. However, they were unsuccessful in securing
the collaboration of a single Frenchman. Lamennais turned
them down. Lamartine considered that his contributing to
the journal would constitute an unwarrantable interference in
German affairs. Louis Blanc had misgivings on -account of
the Young Hegelians’ defiantly acknowledged atheism. He
was anti-clerical, of course, but as an admirer of Robespierre
THE GERMANS LEARN FRENCH 67
and an heir of the Jacobins he was a deist. Leroux was for the
time being entirely occupied with the invention of a printing
machine. Cabet and Considerant also refused to associate
themselves with the new journal, and Proudhon was only
occasionally in Paris. The new enterprise became The German -
French Tear-Books all the same. It taught the Germans To talk
French , 5 i.e. to be revolutionaries.
All the German contributors were Emigres. Not a single
contributor wrote from Germany. Feuerbach’s reason for
declining Marx’s invitation to contribute was not very plausible.
Even Bakunin in Zurich, with whom Ruge and Marx had
already corresponded — the letters were published in the
Jahrbiicher — withdrew. The poets Herwegh and Heine were
the only contributors, apart from Marx, whose names were
known.
The money for the journal was supplied by Frobel, who put
up three thousand francs, and Ruge, who put up six thousand
thalers. Ruge and Marx shared the editorship, but Ruge did
little. At first he was away from Paris and soon after he came
back he was taken ill. All the work devolved upon Marx.
The first and only double number appeared at the end of
February.
Two essays by Marx appeared in it. One was ‘On the
Jewish Question , 5 and was in reply to two essays of Bruno
Bauer. Marx had written it at Kreuznach. The other,
‘Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law 5 he had started
at Kreuznach and finished at the end of the year in Paris.
After the suspension of the Rheinische %eitung Marx ‘withdrew
from the public stage into the study to solve the doubts that
assailed him . 5 He had to come to terms in his own mind with
the Hegelian philosophy of law under the guidance of which
he had fought his journalistic battle. In that battle it h^d been
smashed to pieces. Ac cording to Hegel the state was the creator
and guardian^fj rat g^aljm d political orders Thesocial
orgamsatlon^pi^eeded from thestate! But in dealing with
the distress among the wine-growing peasants of the Moselle
Marx had been forced to acknowledge that ‘there are circum-
stances which are decided as much by the actions of private
individuals as by individual officials, and are as independent
of them as the method of drawing one’s breath . 5 The more
68
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Marx examined the ‘circumstances 5 which the actions of ‘indi-
vidual officials 5 determined the wider the scope they seemed
to include. The ‘circumstances 5 turned out to be the special
interests of quite definite social groups, and the ‘individual
officials 5 ended by becoming identified with the state itself.
Marx found it necessary to inquire whether the relations of
state and society were not just the reverse of what Hegel had
conceived them to be.
Ludwig Feuerbach’s Introductory Theses to the Reform of
Philosophy appeared in March, 1843. In this work the doubts
which assailed Marx in his own special domain of Hegelian
philosophy were exposed in their most general form and solved
by a complete reversal of the Hegelian system. ‘The true
relation of thought to being is only this, 5 wrote Feuerbach.
‘Being is subject, thought predicate. Thought arises from being,
not being from thought. All speculations about law, about
will, freedom, personality, without man, beside him or above
him, are speculations without unity, necessity, substance, basis
or reality. Man is the existence of personality, the existence
of liberty, the existence of law. 5 Ideas have their origin in
reality, they never realise themselves in reality. Applied to
the philosophy of law, it follows from this reversal that it is
not the idea of the state, the idea realising itself in the state,
which creates and directs society, but society which conditions
the state. In 1859, Marx summarised the result of his inquiries
at this time in the classical sentences: ‘Legal conditions, like
state forms, are neither to be explained as things in themselves
nor from the so-called general development of the human
spirit. They have their roots rather in the material conditions
of life, the whole of which Hegel, following the example of
eighteenth-century Englishmen and Frenchmen, included under
the naipe of “civil society. 555
Feuerbach recognised man to be the creator of ideas which
Hegel externalised into independent entities. But even in
Hegel man is still an abstraction, a generic being, still ‘languish-
ing quite outside the world, having no history. 5 Marx went
farther than Feuerbach; he went into the world of concrete
reality. ‘Man is the world of men, the state, society. 5
Criticism of the state became at the same time criticism
of the social order. It reached farther and penetrated to
THE GERMANS LEARN FRENCH 69
the foundations of society. Those foundations were private
property. Logically Marx took the final step. Only one socia
class could fulfil the task of shaking off barbarism. That clasj
was the proletariat. ‘The revolution requires a materia
foundation. Theory is only realised in a people in so far as it*
realisation is a practical necessity. It is not enough that thought!
presses for realisation, reality itself must press for thought.’ The
answer to the question as to where the possibility of emancipa^
tion in practice lay was as follows: ‘It lay in the formation of a
class with radical chains, a class in bourgeois society, which isj
yet not of bourgeois society, a social rank which is the abolition
of all social ranks ... a sphere of society which cannot
emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other
spheres of society and thus emancipating all other spheres of]
society at the same time, which in a word, is the complete loss
of man, and which can only attain itself again by the complete
winning of man. This social catalyst is the proletariat.’
Philosophy had emerged into economics. At the end of
the road taken by political radicalism in its criticism of the
irrational Prussian State lay Communism, the abolition of
private property, the proletarian revolution.
The Deutsch-Franzosiche Jahrbiicher was the last product of
the Young Hegelians. It was the last not only in the sense
that after it the Young Hegelians were spoken of no more, but
also in another sense. There was nothing left for them to say.
Young Hegelianism had become Communism. Or rather
Young Hegelianism as such shrank back from its consequences,
revised its premises and disintegrated; whether into narrow
petty bourgeois philistinism or ‘absolute’ criticism or individual
philosophy or any othef petty-bourgeois manifestation is in the
last resort immaterial.
Ruge was not entirely satisfied with the contents of] Marx’s
first number. He considered some of Marx’s ‘epigrams’ too
artificial, others too crude. ‘Some unpolished things were also
served up which otherwise (that is to say, if I had not been
ill) I should have corrected, but as it is they got by in the
rush.’ Nevertheless he considered that the issue also contained
a number of remarkable things which would attract a great
deal of attention in Germany.
They did indeed attract a great deal of attention. The few
70 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
copies that entered Germany were secretly passed from hand
to hand. They caused astonishment, admiration, execration
and disgust among Marx’s former comrades. Those who were
frightened stopped their ears, shut their eyes, dazzled by the
new light. All were greatly affected.
The other side of this political and literary success was
material failure. The police grasped the fact that the Jahrbiicher
were incomparably more dangerous than anything they had
had to concern themselves with before. In April the Prussian
Government informed the provincial authorities that the
Jahrbiicher came within the definition of attempted high treason
and ttse-majesti. The police were directed to place Ruge,
Marx, Heine, Bernays and their collaborators under arrest
immediately they should set foot on Prussian soil. The head
of the Austrian police and censorship department described
the Jahrbiicher as a publication ‘whose loathsome and disgusting
contents surpass everything previously published by the revolu-
tionary Press . 5 Metternich was afraid it might be ‘smuggled
into the Austrian realm . 5 The whole official apparatus was
set in motion, right down to the administrators of the town
wards. Booksellers were warned against buying this monster
of a book and ‘notified of the severe penalties involved . 5 An
exhaustive search was ordered to be made for it at all
second-hand book-shops.
A hundred copies fell into the hands of the police on a Rhine
steamer and two hundred and thirty were confiscated by the
Bavarians at the frontier of France and the Palatinate. Ruge
described later how Bernays, who accompanied the parcel on
its ill-fated journey, came back very gaily with the information
that he had disposed of the whole lot at once. The Customs
officials had almost doubled up with laughter over Heine’s
verses ajpout King Ludwig; a pleasure, Ruge added, that Heine
and they could have had much more cheaply.
Frobel refused to continue with the undertaking. Ruge,
who was prosperous — he had only recently increased his fortune
by successful speculations — though it was his encouragement
that had brought Marx to Paris and though he had guaranteed
him a definite income for his work as editor, withdrew likewise.
Publication ceased after the first number, and Marx was left
in a very difficult situation. He urged Ruge to keep his
THE GERMANS LEARN FRENCH 71
promise, but Ruge declined. The most he consented to was
paying Marx in kind. He left him the unsold copies of the
Jahrbucher to dispose of as best he could.
A violent quarrel between Marx and Ruge resulted. It
would not, however, have ended in a definite rupture had not
other personal differences, especially on fundamental matters
of principle, been developing between them for some time.
Emma Herwegh relates that Ruge proposed to Marx and
Herwegh that they should go and live with him and found
a kind of Fourierist phalansUre , a communal household which
the women should take it in turn to manage, doing the
cooking and sewing and all the other domestic work required.
‘Frau Herwegh rejected the idea at once. How could a nice
little Saxon woman like Frau Ruge possibly get on with the
highly intelligent and even more ambitious Madame Marx,
who knew so much more than she? And how could the so
recently married Frau Herwegh, who was the youngest of
them all, possibly feel attracted to this communal life? Surely
enough, Herwegh and his wife declined Ruge’s invitation.
Ruge and Marx and their wives went to live together in the
Rue Vanneau. A fortnight later they parted . 5
Marx and Ruge differed far too much in character, tempera-
ment and outlook on life for their collaboration to have
endured, even if these external conflicts had not arisen. Ruge
was a radical petty-bourgeois, a narrow-minded moralist, a
tedious censor of morals, a careful, calculating business man,
even if he was not altogether averse to sacrificing some fraction
of his money for a cause — provided certain definite limits were
not overstepped. Marx was a revolutionary. Ruge, as Marx
was forced to recognise in Paris, rejoiced in ‘a fundamental
and universal ignorance . 5 He could not understand that Marx
‘reads so much, works with such extraordinary intensity some-
times actually does not go to bed for four nights running, and
keeps on plunging anew into an ocean of books . 5
The final and open rupture came because of Ruge’s opinion
of Georg Herwegh. There is no record of Marx’s side of the
case, but what Ruge stated in his own justification is sufficient.
Herwegh was married to a rich Berlin banker’s daughter
and was very fond of luxury. It is not necessarily true that he
was absurdly extravagant in clothes, flowers, food, furniture,
72 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
carriages and horses, although he certainly overdid some
things. Herwegh was very friendly with the Countess d’Agoult,
a friendship which gossip turned into a highly immoral and
dissolute love-affair. ‘One evening/ Ruge wrote to his mother,
‘the conversation turned to this topic. ... I was incensed
by Herwegh’s way of living and his laziness. Several times
I referred to him warmly as a scoundrel, and declared that
when a man gets married he ought to know what he is doing.
Marx said nothing and took his departure in a perfectly friendly
manner. Next morning he wrote to me that Herwegh was a
genius with a great future. My calling him a scoundrel filled
him with indignation, and my ideas on marriage were philistine
and inhuman. Since then we have not seen each other
again.’
Marx defended Herwegh on another occasion; this time
against Heine. The Jahrbiicher group had hailed Heine with
joy. He was a new man, with new ideas. His arrival was like
a blast of fresh air, a burst of stormy movement. He made
friends with the Jahrbiicher group, having quarrelled with
practically all the other German emigres and being lonely and
in bad health. He soon took a dislike to Ruge, of whom he
said that though he had freedom in his mind, he would not
let it sink into his limbs; however enthusiastic he might be for
Hellenic nudity, he was quite incapable of bringing himself to
cast off his barbaric modern trousers, or even the Christian-
German pants of convention. Eleanor Marx remembered
hearing from her parents that there was a time when Heine
came to Marx’s house day in and day out, to read his verses
to the young couple and obtain their opinion of them. Heine
and Marx would go through a little poem of eight lines a
countless number of times, continually discussing one word
or another and working away at it until everything was
perfectly smooth and no trace of the workshop and the file
was left. An infinite amount of patience was required for all
this, because Heine was morbidly sensitive to criticism. Some-
times he would come to Marx, literally weeping because of an
attack by some obscure reviewer. Marx’s only way of dealing
with the situation was to send him to his wife, whose wit and
charm soon brought the desperate poet round to reason.
Heine did not always come seeking for help. Sometimes he
THE GERMANS LEARN FRENCH 73
brought it. One example of this the Marx family had particular
cause to remember.
When little Jenny Marx — she was born on May i, 1844 —
was a baby of only a few months, she was seized with violent
cramps which seemed to be threatening her life. Marx and
his wife stood by the child in despair, not knowing what to
do. Heine arrived, looked at the child and said: ‘The baby
must be given a bath.’ He prepared the bath himself, put the
child in it, and as Marx said, saved Jenny's life.
It was certainly more than a coincidence that Heine wrote
Germany: A Winter's Tale during the year in which he and
Marx were friends. He sent parts of it to Marx from Hamburg
for serialisation in the Paris Vorwarts before publication of the
whole. He ended the accompanying letter with the words:
‘Farewell, dear friend, and excuse my terrible scrawl. I cannot
read over what I have written — but we need but few tokens
to understand each other. 5
Heine’s Weaver's Song also appeared for the first time in
Vorwarts , and Marx wrote about the rising of the Silesian
weavers in the same paper. If in 1843, when he recognised
as latent in the proletariat the power which should carry his
philosophy into practice, he regarded the proletarian revolution
as necessary and inevitable though for the time lying in the
indefinite future, he now believed he saw Communism actually
coming into being before his eyes. However he over-esti-
mated the desperate revolt of the Silesian weavers. They
were not, as he then believed, ahead of the English and French
workers’ movements in class-consciousness and clarity of pur-
pose. On the contrary, they were a long way behind them.
This was no rising of organised industrial workers against the
capitalists but wild rioting by desperate, impoverished home-
workers, who smashed machines as they had done in England
half a century before. The philosophic foundation of Com-
munism was manifestly insufficient to grapple with the facts.
So Marx threw all his energy into the study of political
economy. He read and made excerpts from the French
economists, J. B. Say, Frederic Skarbek, Destutt de Tracy,
P. le Pesant de Boisguilbert, besides the great English econ*
omists, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J. R. M c Culloch and
James Mill, whom he read in French translations. He studied
74 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
jhistory, especially that of the French Revolution. For a time
? he planned to write a history of the Convention. And he sought
knd found contact with the German artisans, the real pro-
letariat, whom so far he had scarcely seen face to face, and with
the French secret societies, who were the real revolutionaries.
For the time being he was free from material worries. Former
shareholders of the Rheinische ^eitung sent him a thousand thalers
in March and in July Georg Jung sent him eight hundred
francs as compensation for the hundred confiscated copies of
the Jahrbiicher .
CHAPTER VII
THE COMMUNIST ARTISANS OF PARIS
Several tens of thousands of Germans were living in Paris
in the middle of the forties. This large colony was divided
into two sections having practically no contact with one
another. One consisted of writers and artists and the other of
artisans. Some trades were almost exclusively in the hands of
Germans. This applied particularly to the cobbler’s trade.
In fact in Paris ‘German 5 and ‘cobbler 5 had almost become
synonymous.
Many German artisans went to Paris to improve themselves
in the city which dictated the fashions and the taste of Europe,
and after a year returned to Germany. Most of them learned
but little French, and in Paris they lived a life of their own.
This also applied to the great majority of those who had been
driven from their native land by sheer hunger and want. The
latter class remained in France. Both classes alike depressed
the wages of French workers, and for a number of years French
and German workers were bitterly hostile. Fierce encounters
often took place in the Faubourg St. Antoine, which was then
a working-class district. French workers would attack the
Germans and there would be regular street battles.
The tension did not diminish until various revolutionary
organisations started their activities among the workers. Quite
a number of political emigres had gathered in Paris after the
failure of the revolt of the German ‘Burschenschafter 5 in 1833.
It appears from the dossiers of the Paris Prefecture of Police
that the first secret societies among German imigr&s were#formed
in the middle of the thirties. At first they consisted exclusively
of intellectuals, but they soon attracted workers too. Dr.
Ewerbeck, a physician, one of the first to go among the workers
with revolutionary propaganda, describes how he once took
Ludwig Borne to a meeting. Borne listened to the speeches,
looked at the faces about him, and burst into tears of pleasure
as he left. The revolutionary intelligentsia had found its way
to the people.
75
76 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
The German conspirators soon made contact with the
French secret societies. The most active, alert-minded German
workers lived the life of their French class-comrades. Soon
there was no French secret society without a German member.
The Blanquist groups actually had special German sections.
This joint work did more and more to heal the breach between
the French and German workers, and thus enhanced the
reputation of the revolutionaries among their German fellow-
countrymen.
After the Congress of Vienna Europe was full of secret
societies. At first they were most widespread in the Latin
countries. The Carbonari kept the ideals of the Jacobins alive
during the years of reaction, and the Blanquist leagues were
their French form. As working-class influence in these organ-
isations increased — for workers tended more and more to form
the predominating majority of their members — Socialist ideas
gradually crept in. Socialist influence was predominant from
the middle of the thirties.
For a long time secret societies in Germany continued to be
almost exclusively composed of students and professional men.
Out of the ‘League of Exiles’ there had arisen the ‘League of
the Just.’ The League of Exiles consisted originally of emigri
intellectuals and it had increased its numbers by admitting
workers to its ranks. In this society intellectuals and workers
did not hold together as they managed, though not without
occasional friction, to do in others. The workers in the League
of Exiles cut themselves adrift from the intellectuals and formed
a new society of their own — the League of the Just. Hardly
any educated men belonged to it. The League of the Just
entirely dissociated themselves from the radical literary groups,
with whom they wished to have nothing whatever to do.
They regarded the ‘humanists’ with the greatest possible
suspicion. Weitling remarked that their humanism did not
come from homo , a man, but from Humaine, which was the
name of one of the leading Paris tailors. All humanists had
to have a suit from Humaine, Weitling maintained. The
League of the Just, the members of which belonged almost
exclusively to the working classes, very soon started adopting
Socialist ideas. After the failure of the rising attempted by
the Paris Blanquists in 1839, which members of the League
THE COMMUNIST ARTISANS OF PARIS JJ
of the Just took part, this process was completed. In London,
whither they fled, Socialist intellectuals lived like proletarians.
Schapper, their leader, a former student of forestry, had worked
as a compositor in Paris.
The spiritual leader of the League of the Just was Wilhelm
Weitling. Weitling was born in Magdeburg in 1808. He was
the illegitimate son of a French officer and a German laundress.
Being ‘tainted 5 for that reason, driven from pillar to post, offcen
subjected to humiliation, this young, brooding, talented and
gifted tailor’s assistant had become a rebel early. He wrote
Humanity as It Is and as It Ought to be in 1835, and in 1842 there
appeared his Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom , an important
landmark in the history of criticism of contemporary society.
It pointed to a future society to be founded on the law of
nature and love. In 1841 he fled from France to Switzer-
land and issued a periodical called Der Hiilferuf der Deutschen
Jugend from Geneva. Seven hundred of the thousand copies
that were printed went to France, according to the Paris police
estimate.
To Marx Weitling was the ideologist of the first, still crude
proletarian movement which culminated in the Silesian
weavers’ rising. In the article in Vorwarts already mentioned
Marx wrote: ‘Where could the bourgeoisie — including the
scribes and the philosophers — boast of a work like Weitling’s
Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom regarding the emancipation of
the bourgeoisie — political emancipation, that is to say? If one
compares the jejune, timid mediocrity of German political
literature with the unbounded brilliance of the literary debut of
the German worker; if one compares the gigantic footprints of
the proletariat, still in its infancy, with the diminutive political
traces left by the German bourgeoisie, one can prophecy a truly
athletic, powerful form for the German Cinderella.’
Propaganda by the Communist workers was now intensified.
The aim was no longer merely that of holding a small group
of revolutionaries together. The object now was to win over
all similarly minded men. In the process their propaganda
came up against revolutionary under-currents with tendencies
similar to their own. In many places in Germany, particularly
in the Harz Mountains and in Silesia, a number of Christian
sects had managed, in spite of all persecution, to keep together
78 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
and continue teaching a crude kind of Primitive Christian
Com muni sm. Emigrants to America were constantly founding
anabaptist groups, which linked up with those who stayed at
home. Thoughtful, brooding Silesian and Saxon working men,
having no connection with one another, relying entirely upon
themselves, independently worked out Communistic Utopias,
founded upon the Bible, the only book they knew. Such
knowledge of them as occasionally came the way of the educated
world caused either irritation, amusement or contempt. The
idea of the communalisation of women arose among the ana-
baptists. ‘The whole bourgeois world denounces us for wishing
to introduce the communalisation of women,’ is a phrase in
the Communist Manifesto. Georg Weerth, a friend of Marx’s
and a colleague of his on the Neue Rheinische £eitung> wrote this
comic poem:
Auch nach Weibergemeinschaft steht ihr Sinn,
Abschaffen wolVn sie die Ehe,
Dass alles in Zukunft ad libitum
Miteinander zu Bette gehe:
Tartar und Mongole mit GriechenfraiCn ,
Cherusker mit gelben Chinesen,
Eisbaren mit schwedischen NachtigalVn,
Turkinnen und Irokesen.
Tranduftende Samoyedinnen solVn
Zu Briten und Romern sich betten,
Plattnasige diistre Kaffern zu
Alab aster weissen Grisetten.
Ja , andern wird sich die ganze Welt
Durch diese moderne Leitung-
Doch die schonsten Weiber bekommen die
Redakteure der Rheinischcn Zeitung . 1
The influence on the secret societies of the Primitive Christian
Communism of the various sects also came out in phraseology.
In the League of Exiles a unit, following the practice of the
Carbonari was called a ‘hut’ and the members were ‘comrades.’
In the forties the League of the Just used the terms ‘communes’
1 They are also minded to communalise women; they want to abolish marriage,
so everybody in the future may go to bed with one another ad libitum ; Tartars and
Mongols with Greek women; Cheruscans with yellow Chinese; polar bears with
Swedish nightingales, Turkish girls and Iroquois; oil-sccnted Samoyed women
shall bed with Britons and Romans, and swarthy flat-nosed Kaffirs with alabaster-
white grisettes. Yes, we shall alter the whole world under this modern manage-
ment, but the most beautiful women will be reserved for the editorial staff* of the
Rheinische Zeitung.
THE COMMUNIST ARTISANS OF PARIS 79
and ‘brothers. 5 In Switzerland members met for common love
feasts, like the apostles and disciples of Christ. All these under-
currents and more were mingled in the Communism of the
German artisans. The ideals of primitive Christianity jostled
with the ideas of Saint-Simon, Owen and Fourier. The
Communism of these men, as can be well imagined from the
situation in which they found themselves, was essentially a
longing for a return to a transfigured pre-capitalist world
rather than the forward-looking will of a new class for a new
world of which they were to be the expression. The idea
that industry itself creates the conditions for and the
possibility of a social revolution, and that the proletariat
has a historical task to fulfil was remote from the minds
of the German artisan Communists. They could not con-
ceive of the evils under which they suffered as being other
than the consequences of the machinations of bad and
egoistical men.
This ‘utterly crude and unintelligent Communism 5 was
repudiated by Marx. He saw ‘its central motive as want. 5
He rebelled against the ‘bestial 5 idea of the communalisation
of women. This kind of Communism ‘denied personality 5 and
‘physical possessions were the only aim of its life and being. 5
The elements in it that Marx valued were its criticism of the
existing state of things and its will to overthrow it by force.
The French secret societies with whom the German Communist
associations were in touch were animated by the same revolu-
tionary ardour. Since the time of the French Revolution,
from Gracchus Babeuf through Buonarotti to Blanqui, they
had remained faithful, though in the most multifarious forms,
to the single idea of a violent popular revolution. They
believed that the people could not be freed from their tor-
mentors and exploiters and that ultimately justice could not
be obtained for the poor unless they rose and shattered their
enemies to pieces.
The identity of the leaders of the secret societies of French
workers with whom Marx came into personal contact has not
yet been established. He was introduced to the German
Communist group by Dr. Ewerbeck. According to reports of
Prussian secret agents, with whom Paris swarmed in the
summer of 1844, Marx was a frequent guest at workers 5
8 o
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
meetings at the Barriere du Trone, Rue de Vincennes. He did
not join either the League of the Just or any of the French
secret societies. The gulf between him and them was too
great. As men and fighters Marx valued them highly. In
1844 he wrote that ‘at the Communist workers 5 meetings
brotherhood is no phrase but a reality, and a true spirit of
nobility is reflected in the faces of these men hardened by
labour. 5 He admired in them ‘their studiousness, their thirst
for knowledge, their moral energy, their restless urge for
development. 5
Marx had no easy task in gaining the ear of the Communist
workers. Most of those who had ever made contact with
bourgeois revolutionary writers regretted the experience. When
Weitling’s friends were collecting money to pay for printing
his works, Ewerbeck asked Ruge for a contribution, and Ruge
angrily refused. He was filled with righteous indignation at
the German Communists, ‘who wanted to make all men free
by making them workers and proposed replacing private
property by communal property and the just division of wealth,
themselves laying all stress on property and money in particular. 5
Marx did not meet Weitling personally until the summer
of 1845.
Besides the French and German Communists with whom
he was in touch, Marx kept in contact with the French
Socialists. He did not share their faith in the possibility of
transforming bourgeois society by gradual reforms, belief in
which separated them from the Communists. He was unable
to share their hope of persuading the possessing classes by the
force of argument to search into their hearts and turn over a
new leaf. But from Socialist criticism of existing society he
learned a great deal. The Communists a priori rejected this
world as an evil world of evil men. The hatred that filled them
sharpened their sight for social contradictions and gave their
criticism a moral force which made that of the Socialists seem
feeble in comparison. But the Socialists did not just see the
division of the world into rich and poor. They observed the
rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer, they watched
a historical process developing before their eyes, the downfall
of the middle strata, the growing accumulation of capital.
They stood in the midst of their times and sought to understand
THE COMMUNIST ARTISANS OF PARIS 8l
them. The Communists who followed Weitling were citizens
of the kingdom of Utopia on leave.
In July, 1844, Marx met Proudhon, with whom he kept in
contact as long as he remained in Paris. He had long dis-
cussions with him, which often lasted all night long, and
‘infected’ him with Hegelianism. Marx did not meet Louis
Blanc till towards the end of his stay in Paris. Marx said in
1853 that they formed ‘a kind of friendship, if not a specially
close one.’
After the collapse of the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher Marx
no longer had a mouthpiece through which he could work,
although in Paris it was more important to have one than ever.
‘ C’est surtout a Paris ,’ a report of the Ministry of the Interior
stated, ‘ que les communisfes allemands out etabli le foyer et le point
de depart de leurs intrigues; Pest par la France qpils esphent agir ;
en dehors de ce royaume , si ce Pest en Angleterre , Us n 0 sent affronter
avec une egale audace la severite des lois et celle des magistrats ' 1
The possibility of creating a popular paper which should be
intelligible to the German Communist workers presented itself
in Vorwarts. The founder of this weekly was Heinrich Born-
stein, who was a translator and an acute business man. The
money for founding the paper had been put up by Meyerbeer,
the composer. Like the few other German papers that had
been established in Paris before it, it met with only meagre
success as long as it was more concerned with tittle-tattle and
theatrical gossip than with the questions that agitated the minds
of all the Germans in Paris who read a newspaper at all. But
Bornstein could also write for the Left. On July 1, 1844, he
appointed Bernays editor of Vorwarts . Bernays was an excep-
tionally witty and nimble-minded man and had contributed
to the Deutsck-Franzosische Jahrbiicher .
All emigris of all political leanings started by making use of
the opportunity of writing for Vorwarts . They did so less out
of enthusiasm for the paper than because they had no choice.
Bornstein writes in his reminiscences:
‘There soon gathered round Vorwarts a group of writers such
1 The German Communists have made Paris their headquarters and the centre
from which all their intrigues radiate. It is through France that they hope to act.
Outside the kingdom of France there is no country, except, perhaps, England,
where they dare affront the severity of the laws and the magistrates with such
audacity.
6
82 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
as no other paper anywhere could boast, particularly in
Germany, where the state of the Press at that time, before the
lively assault of 1848, was appalling. Besides Bernays and
myself, who were the editors, there wrote for the paper Arnold
Ruge, Karl Marx, Heinrich Heine, Georg Herwegh, Bakunin,
Georg Weerth, G. Weber, Fr. Engels, Dr. Ewerbeck and H.
Biirgers. It can well be imagined that these men wrote not
only very brilliantly but very radically. Vorwarts , as the only
uncensored radical paper appearing in the German language
anywhere in Europe, soon had a new appeal and increased
in circulation. (Bornstein omits to mention that he was the
only one to whom it mattered.)
‘I still remember with pleasure/ he continued, ‘the editorial
conferences, which often took place weekly, at which all these
men gathered in my office. I had rented the first floor of the
corner house of the Rue des Moulins and the Rue Neuve des
Petits Champs. . . . From twelve to fourteen men used to
gather for these editorial conferences. Some would sit on the
bed or on the trunks, others would stand or walk about. They
would all smoke terrifically, and argue with great passion and
excitement. It was impossible to open the windows, because
a crowd would immediately have gathered in the street to
find out the cause of the violent uproar, and very soon the room
was concealed in such a thick cloud of tobacco-smoke that it
was impossible for a newcomer to recognise anybody present.
In the end we ourselves could not even recognise each
other. 5
Marx’s first article in Vorwarts appeared on August 7, and
from the middle of August onwards his influence on the paper
steadily increased. Vorwarts’ s attacks on Frederick William IV,
as the most exalted and most assailable representative of
reaction, became more and more violent. Heine wrote his
verses about the ‘new Alexander. 5 The Prussian Government,
angry but powerless in the matter, did not decide to intervene
in Paris until Vorwarts extolled Burgomaster Tscech’s attempted
assassination of the king. Ernst Dronke describes ‘how the
dicta of the Press went home in Prussian official circles in spite
of their pretended bureaucratic indifference. At a meeting
to commemorate the introduction of municipal government in
Berlin the Minister, Arnim, could actually not refrain from
THE COMMUNIST ARTISANS OF PARIS 83
mentioning with abhorrence the praises of regicide which are
understood here to have appeared in Vorwarts, the forbidden
Paris paper. 5 The language of Vorwdrts had indeed been very
strong. An attempt on the life of a German king, it stated,
was Germany’s only argument against German absolutism.
All others had failed. Absolutism lost its divine infallibility
as soon as it was shown to be assailable. Its assailability must
be shown on the person of a German king, because neither the
fate of Charles I nor of Louis XVI nor the many attempts on
the life of Louis Philippe had taught Germany its lesson.
The draconic penalties for introducing the ‘dregs 5 of German
journalism no longer sufficed. So the king of Prussia appealed
to the professional solidarity of kings. The ambassador, von
Arnim, made representations to the Prime Minister, Guizot.
Guizot was not particularly inclined to do what Arnim asked.
True, he had Bernays brought up before a summary court
and sentenced to two months 5 imprisonment and a fine of
three hundred francs because Vorwdrts had not paid the fee
for the prescribed licence. A charge based on the anti-Prussian
article would, however, have to be tried by a jury. This
prospect did not suit the ambassador, and he declined it.
Such a trial would in effect become a political demonstration,
and the accused, as in so many trials at that time, would have
too good an opportunity of giving the widest publicity to their
propaganda. The Prussian Government would attach no value
whatever to a trial of that kind. So Frederick William IV
sent Alexander von Humboldt to Louis Philippe as a special
envoy. On January 7, 1845, Humboldt presented His Majesty
with ‘a beautiful porcelain vase 5 together with a long letter
from his master, Frederick William IV. Louis Philippe was
delighted at the cordial greetings of the Prussian king. He
assured Humboldt of his firm determination to rid Paris of the
German atheists.
The Prussian Government had got what it wanted. Its
secret agents had been on Marx’s tracks for a whole year.
His name appears constantly in their reports. They trailed
him even into modest working-class taverns. They denounced
him as the leading spirit behind Vorwdrts and his name headed
the list of evil-doers whose expulsion Prussia demanded
On January 11 the Minister of the Interior ordered the
84 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
expulsion of Marx, Ruge, Borns tein and Bernays. Their
presence in the country, the so-called reasons adduced for the
decision stated, was calculated to disturb public order and
security. They must leave Paris within twenty-four hours of
receiving the order and must leave France within as short a
time as possible. Their return was forbidden under threat of
penalties.
The expulsion order was not unconditional. Its recipients
were discreetly given to understand that they could remain
if they gave an undertaking to refrain from agitating against
friendly governments in the Press. To be sure, this hint was
given them after the Liberal Press had violently protested
against this act of French servility to Prussia and after the
Government step had been condemned in the Chamber even
by many of its own supporters.
Bernays was in prison. Bornstein protested his political
innocuousness and was allowed to stay. He gave his promise
to suspend Vorwarts all the more readily because he found a
new occupation. He entered the service of the French political
police. Ruge moved heaven and earth, proved that he had
nothing whatever to do with the Vorwarts people, and that,
moreover, he was a subject of Saxony. He remained in Paris
too. Marx was the only one to leave.
Heinrich Burgers, in his Reminiscences of Ferdinand Freiligrath ,
writes:
‘In Lent of the year 1845 two young men might have been
seen travelling towards the Belgian frontier in the Messagerie ,
on their way to Brussels. They were alone in the small coach
and beguiled the tedious journey through Picardy with lively
conversation, and an occasional song which the younger of the
two struck up in order to dispel the reflections which the other
tried in vain to master. Their journey was not entirely
voluntary, although it was made of their own choice. Karl
Marx — for he was the elder of the two young German travellers
— had been served with an expulsion order by the Paris
Prefecture of Police. ... It conflicted with his pride to place
himself voluntarily under police supervision, and he decided
rather to transplant himself to Brussels, leaving his wife and
child behind. He took me with him as his travelling-
companion, as the punishment inflicted on the man who was
THE COMMUNIST ARTISANS OF PARIS 85
my friend and faithful guide in my studies had disgusted
me with the prospect of staying any longer in the French
capital.’
Marx arrived in Brussels on February 5, 1845. His wife
followed him soon afterwards with his daughter, who was
barely one year old.
CHAPTER VIII
THE LIFE-LONG FRIEND
I n the fifteen months of Marx’s stay in Paris he had met
Proudhon and Louis Blanc, Heine and Herwegh, German
Communists and members of French secret societies. Some
of them crossed his path again, few encouraged him, he
remained friendly with none. His meeting with Fried-
rich Engels was decisive. From October, 1844, until he
closed his eyes for the last time, in victory and defeat,
in the storm of revolution and the misery of exile, always
struggling and always fighting, he trod by Engels’s side and
Engels trod by his, along the same path towards the same
goal.
Friedrich Engels was born in Barmen on November 28, 1820,
the eldestT son of Friedrich Engels, senior. His father was a
merchant. Engels’s great grandfather, Johann Caspar Engels,
had, on very slender capital, started a lace factory, connected
with a bleaching works and a ribbon manufactory, which
had developed by the time of his death into one of the biggest
undertakings in the Wuppertal and went on expanding under
the energetic management of his sons and grandsons. When
the brothers parted in 1837, Friedrich Engels senior established
the cotton-spinning firm of Engels and Ermen in Manchester.
Later it extended to Barmen. The firm survives to this
day.
The environment in which Engels grew up was as different
as it could possibly have been from that in which Marx passed
his boyhood years. In the Wuppertal bigotry reigned in its
most repulsive form — a narrow, gloomy, moping ‘funda-
mentalism’ which wanted all the world, like it, to go about
in sackcloth and ashes, thinking everlastingly of its sins. No
songs other than hymns must be sung, no books other than
devotional books must be read. Science and art were con-
sidered vanities of the Evil One. When a boy at Engels’s
school asked one of the masters who Goethe was, the peevish
and reproachful answer was that he was ‘an atheist.’ At the
86
THE LIFE-LONG FRIEND 87
age of eighteen Engels described his native town as the ‘Zion
of obscurantism . 5
Engels’s mother had preserved a cheerful disposition from
her happy childhood in Berlin, but his father not only adhered
to the most rigorous observances of the devout but brought up
his children in strict accord with the oppressive spirit of the
prevalent bigotry. Engels was fond of his mother but became
alienated from his father at an early age and actually hated
him.
Trier was a beautiful old town, living on the cultivation of
vine, Bonn was a friendly conglomeration of students, land-
ladies and artisans, and even in Berlin Marx saw practically
nothing of modern industry. Engels grew up among factories
and slums. From his earliest years he was surrounded by
poverty and distress, sick children who ‘breathed more smoke
and dust than oxygen 5 into their lungs in the squalid rooms
in which they lived, men, women and children who worked at
the loom for fourteen or sixteen hours a day, half-starved,
consumptive, their only friend the brandy-bottle which occa-
sionally allowed them to forget the dreariness of their existence;
all the horror of early capitalism, which celebrated its maddest
orgies in this part of the Rhineland.
The lively boy rebelled against the grim existence that
surrounded him. When his father found the ‘otherwise excel-
lent youth 5 reading chivalrous romances instead of pious books
in spite of severe punishments, he reproached him for flippancy
and lack of principle. There was a small group of young poets
at his school, and young Engels wrote poems entirely in the
manner of Ferdinand Freiligrath, who was then a clerk in the
counting-house of a Barmen business house, writing his verses
‘between the journal and the ledger . 5 His poems sung of the
free life of the sons of the desert, of lion hunts and Moorish
kings. Revulsion from Europe and the present was the
first feeble, passive sign of revolt against the Europe of the
time.
As long as Engels lived in Barmen only faint echoes of the
noises of the battle without came to his ears. The bigots of
his native town barely knew the names of Borne, Heine, and the
poets of Young Germany, and they would have been revolted
at the idea of one of their pious community soiling himself by
88
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
reading such heathenish and sinful stuff. They ignored the
movements abroad among the people, and took no interest in
politics, literature or philosophy. Engels may have heard
older schoolfellows of his talking when they came back to
Barmen for their holidays, and this could not have failed to give
wings to his longing to escape from his hateful, cramped
surroundings. But he did not escape yet.
Engels left school a year early. He was an excellent pupil.
He learned easily and quickly, and was particularly good at
languages. His father’s reason for abandoning the idea of
making his son a lawyer and making a merchant of him
instead is unknown. He took him first into his own business,
and a year later sent him to Bremen for wider experience.
He took care that the youth should be preserved from
temptation when away from home. The export house young
Engels entered was on excellent terms with Engels and
Ermen, and the young man lived in the family of a pastor
besides. Bremen was another stronghold of bigotry like his
native town.
It was also a trade centre, with relations to the outside world
that were far different from those of the Wuppertal. In spite
of the patriarchal nature of the state that set its imprint upon
it, it allowed its subjects incomparably more freedom than was
allowed by the timid bureaucracy of Prussia. The censorship
was milder, and allowed many things to pass that in Prussia
would have been strictly forbidden. A new world was suddenly
unfolded before young Engels’s eyes. It attracted and repelled
him, he sought it and then fled from it, it shook him to the
foundations of his being.
The writings of Borne made him a political radical. The
step he thus took over the boundaries imposed upon him seems
to have been an easy one. His breach with the past was no
great wrench. The latently defiant poetry of his school-
days had prepared the way. Literature meant a great deal
to him, and his schoolboy poems led him straight to the poets
of the time, who gave expression to the vague longings
for freedom that possessed him. Through them he was
guided a step farther. With Borne he reached the stage
of development necessary for open-minded young men of
the time.
THE LIFE-LONG FRIEND 89
His struggle with religion was infinitely harder. There is
no shred of evidence to show that the young Marx had any
struggle with religion whatever. But Engels only rid himself
of the faith of his youth and childhood after the most harassing
and agonising torments. The doctrine of predestination was
the corner-stone of the paternal faith. Whom God had chosen
would be saved, whom He had damned was damned for all
eternity. Man had no power in himself to do good, his fate
was predetermined by God, Whose grace was everything. The
inhuman rigour of this doctrine repelled Engels early, but its
complement, the forbidding of fatalistic resignation, the
necessity of faith in one’s own salvation, and of everlastingly
struggling anew for assurance of it, steeped his acts and thoughts
in piety. Though he rejected as fanatical exaggeration a good
deal of what he had been taught to believe was essential, he
was still deeply religious when he went to Bremen. The first
and decisive blow that undermined his faith was Strauss’s
Life of Jesus. If the Bible contained but one single contra-
diction — and Strauss laid bare an abundance of contradictions
— his faith in it was shattered. The very rigour with which the
bigots insisted on the literal verbal inspiration of the Bible
threatened the whole structure if but this one column fell.
Young Engels fought with all his might against the doubts
that assailed him on every side. T pray daily,’ he wrote to
a friend. ‘I pray for the truth practically all day long. I began
to do so as soon as I began to doubt, and yet I do not return
to the faith that you have. . . . Tears come into my eyes as
I write. I am moved to the depths of my being, yet I feel that
I shall not be lost, that I shall come to God, for Whom I yearn
with my whole heart. That, surely, bears witness to the Holy
Spirit, by which I live and die, even if the opposite is ten
thousand times stated in the Bible.’
He did not return to the fold. Schleiermacher kept his
religious feelings alive for some time yet. But, once entered
upon the path, he trod it with characteristic firmness and
unflinching honesty with himself. From religion he went to
philosophy. He became an Hegelian at the age of twenty
and did not stop at that. In October, 1841, when he went to
Berlin to serve a year as volunteer in the Artillery Guards, he
was an Hegelian of the extreme Left Wing. A certain tendency
90 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
to occupy himself with religious historical problems survived
from his religious youth, besides, apparently, a spirit of in-
tolerance that he preserved to his old age. Marx has often
been reproached for obstinacy, but Engels was worse by far.
He once told Eduard Bernstein that though everybody talked
of Marx’s intolerance when Marx presided at the General
Council of the International even the most controversial
questions seldom led to open conflict; when he was in the
chair things were quite different.
Engels soon entered the group of the ‘Freien’ in Berlin,
with whom he took part in the controversy with Schelling,
against whom he wrote two able pamphlets. He wrote for
the Rheinische Zjeitung and other radical journals. His articles
were not worse and most of them were better, wittier and more
lucid than those of the other Berlin Young Hegelians. When
he returned to Barmen in the autumn of 1 842 he could lay claim
to occupying quite a respectable position in the world of letters
at an age — twenty-two — at which the young Marx had not
yet published a line.
Out of regard for his family he had so far written either
anonymously or under the pseudonym of Friedrich Oswald.
But the mentality of his ‘disappointing’ son was not unknown
to his father, nor did the former make any attempt to conceal
it. In a report on Engels’s formative years which dates from
1852 an excellently informed Danish police agent states that
‘the family council decided to withdraw him from the en-
lightening atmosphere of Germany and send him to the factory
in Manchester. His father told him that either he must go to
England and become a decent business man or he would
entirely withdraw all paternal support. After the completion
of his military service as a Prussian subject Engels found it
more prudent to give in and go to Manchester. This was
in the late autumn of 1842.’
Engels chose to travel via Cologne, in order to seize the
opportunity of meeting the staff of the Rheinische Z e ^ un g- His
first meeting with Marx passed off coolly. Marx was just
about to break with the Berlin ‘Freien’ and saw in Engels one
of their allies. Engels on his side had been prejudiced against
Marx by Bruno Bauer. However, they agreed to the extent
that it was arranged that Engels should continue to contribute
THE LIFE-LONG FRIEND gi
to the Rheinische fitting from England. Engels sent his first
dispatch, on the internal crisis in England, on November 30,
almost as soon as he arrived in London.
Engels had a special gift for rapidly finding his way about
on foreign soil, and in his young years, unlike Marx, he was
always quick to form a judgment. But however premature the
views that he put forward might seem — a young man in a
country for the first time attempting to unravel its innermost
structure after two days on its soil — they were less premature
than they appeared. Engels had studied English affairs ‘on
the quiet 5 in Germany, the outward reason being that he was
going to Manchester. But there were other weighty reasons
as well.
Engels J^ecamc a. Communist in, the autumn of 1842. In this
he did not differ from other Left Hegelians, who, proceeding
from religious criticism, had come over to Feuerbach and
recognised in Communism the only possibility of realising the
generic notion of man. Engels had met Moses Hess and been
strongly influenced by his conception of world history, accord-
ing to which the Germans were to carry out the philosophical
revolution, the French the political revolution and the English
the economic revolution. In a letter Hess wrote Berthold
Auerbach in October, 1842, he told him he had been discussing
questions of the day with Engels and that Engels had left him
a most enthusiastic Communist.
Like Marx, Engels came to Communism by way of con-
temporary German philosophy. But Engels’s Communism was
fed from other than philosophical sources. The conclusions
of the philosophers could only be put into practice by means
of the abolition of private property, and Communism alone
could free mankind from barbarism. Marx reached this con-
clusion as the result of a process of intellectual development.
Engels crossed the ‘t’s 5 and dotted the ‘i’s 5 of his theory from
the evidence of his senses. Engels knew the state of the prole-
tariat at first hand — ‘the status which represents the complete
loss of humanity. 5 All he needed for the whole extent of the
dehumanisation it involved to become plain to him was to
re-tread the way to it, this time by the high road of philosophy.
For him the proletariat was not just a philosophical instrument,
but meant the proletariat of the Wuppertal, the workers in
92 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
his father’s factory. He only had to look about him to see
dehumanisation in its grossest form. He had known for a long
time that the spinners in his father’s factory in Manchester
lived the same brutalised existence as their class-comrades in
suffering in Germany. Their brutalisation was the conse-
quence of an economic system in which he lived and which
he knew from the inside. Philosophy led him, like Marx,
into the field of economics. He had this advantage over Marx,
that he could study economic realities while living in their
midst.
Engels passed nearly two years in Manchester, and they
bore rich fruit. How well he applied himself to the mastery
of economics is demonstrated in the Umrisse zur Kritik der
Nationalokonomie, his ‘brilliant sketches’ in the Deutsch-Franzo-
sische Jahrbiicher. Engels set out to demonstrate all economic
categories as aspects of private property and all contradictions
of bourgeois economy as necessary consequences of private
property. Expressed in philosophical language and often only
by implication, the work contains the foundations of scientific
Socialism. The much-extolled system of free competition, it
argues, leads to an ever more precipitous breach between
capitalists and workers. While political economists were
working out their theories about the balancing of supply and
demand and the impossibility of over-production, reality
answered them with trade crises which returned as regularly
as comets and brought more suffering and mischief in their
wake than the great plagues of old. While the reign of private
enterprise lasted, crises would recur; each one more universal,
therefore more severe than the last, impoverishing a greater
number of small capitalists and increasing in ever greater
proportion the multitude of the class living on bare work
alone. Thus private property produced the revolution by
itself.
The more deeply Engels penetrated the English social and
economic scheme, the clearer it became to him that the English
were not to be won over by the categories he had relied on up
to now. However persistently he tried to drum into the heads
of the ‘obdurate Britons’ what was taken for granted in
Germany, namely that ‘so-called material interests never appear
in history as self-sufficient motives, but that they nevertheless,
THE LIFE-LONG FRIEND 93
whether consciously or unconsciously, invariably provide the
guiding strings of historical progress/ he did not succeed. He
was forced reluctantly to resign himself to the conclusion that
in England only the conflict of material interests was recog-
nised. In England interests and not principles would begin
and carry out the revolution. But this applied to England
only. To Germany it did not apply. ‘The Germans/ he
tried to explain to his English friends — in English — at the end
of 1843, <are a ver Y disinterested nation; if in Germany principle
comes into collision with interest, principle will almost always
silence the claims of interest. The same love of abstract
principle, the same disregard of reality and self-interest which
have brought the Germans to a state of political nonentity,
these very same qualities guarantee the success of philosophical
Communism in that country. 5
But now he was in England, a country which ignored
general principles, it became his task to base his Communism
on a foundation of material interests. Engels found a great
workers 5 movement, that of the Chartists, in progress. Its
aims were purely political, but Engels did not doubt for a
moment that it was bound to become Socialist, and that within
a short time the Chartists would see that private property was
the root of all the evils from which the working classes were
suffering. After the abortive attempt at a general strike to
enforce universal suffrage, they must confine themselves for
the time being to propaganda. Engels was a close observer
of the first great independent workers 5 movement to take
place in a European country. It was something for which
not even the preliminaries were to hand in Germany. He got
into touch with the Chartists through James Leach, a Man-
chester workman, and in Leeds he established a friendship
with George Julian Harney, editor of the Chartist paper, The
Northern Star.
He admired the practice of the Chartists, but, as a Com-
munist and an atheist, he was closer in theoretical outlook to
Robert Owen. He heartily approved of Owen’s struggle
against the marriage tie, religion and private property, which
Owen regarded as the three irrational, arch-egoistical institu-
tions from which humanity must be freed in order that a new
world founded on reason and solidarity might be built. He
94 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
made contact with the Owenites, and in their paper, The New
Moral World , he described to the English, who had scarcely
heard of it, the growth and development of Continental
Communism.
Engels lived at the heart of the English cotton industry,
the most modern industry in the most modern industrial
country of Europe. In spite of the ‘tremendous advances’
made in recent years, his native Wuppertal could not compare
with it. He found that just where industrialism was flourishing
most exuberantly the proletariat was plunged into the greatest
distress. For month after month Engels roamed through the
working-class districts of Manchester, which he soon got to
know better than most of its inhabitants. Though he was
familiar with the plight of the German spinners and weavers,
he was profoundly moved by what he saw. His book on the
state of the working-classes in England, based on his observa-
tions and extended researches and written in the winter of
1844-5, is the most flaming indictment of early capitalism ever
written.
At the end of August, 1844, Engels travelled back to Ger-
many by way of Paris, and met Marx for the second time.
In the bare ten days they spent together ‘they established their
agreement in all theoretical fields, and their joint work dates
from that time.’
Engels brought Marx more than he received from him.
Both had come independently to Communism, both had
recognised in the proletariat the class which, product and
negation of private property at the same time, was to abolish
private property. But Engels had an incomparably deeper
insight into the economics of bourgeois society. Living in
economically advanced England, he had anticipated Marx
in understanding its dialectic, its inherent tendency to produce
contradictions and thus its own downfall. He had come face-
to-face with a real workers’ movement, met the proletariat in
its real form. In Manchester ‘he had had his nose rubbed into
the fact that economic realities, which in history written hitherto
had played either no role at all, or at best an insignificant one,
were, at any rate in the modern world, a decisive historical
force; that economic realities provide the foundation from
which present-day class-conflicts arose; that in those countries
THE LIFE-LONG FRIEND 95
where, thanks to big industry, those conflicts had fully de-
veloped, for example in England, they were the foundation
on which political parties were built and party struggles fought
and thus of the whole of political history. Marx had not only
come to the same conclusion but in the Deutsch-Franzosisch 4
Jahrbiicher had arrived at the generalisation that it was not the
state that conditioned and regulated civil society but civil
society that conditioned and regulated the state; and that]
therefore politics and their history were to be explained by]
economic conditions and their development and not the!
reverse. 5
When Engels wrote these phrases in 1885 he represented his
and Marx’s insight into historical reality as more mature than
it really was at the end of 1844. It was not till after their
meeting and the beginning of their co-operation that these
ideas were definitely formulated. Engels helped Marx to make
concrete his quite abstract ideas concerning the relations of
state and society; and Marx helped Engels to understand that
the dependence of politics on material interests, class interests,
a dependence the validity of which Engels had hitherto only
been willing to admit as applying to England, was in reality
valid for all countries alike. But he still maintained, when he
once more trod the soil of his native land, that Germany could
only be won for Communism by the insight of educated
people.
Before the two friends parted they decided to cross swords
with Bruno Bauer for the last time. Engels wrote his con-
tribution to the planned pamphlet while still in Paris. It filled
about twenty pages. Marx harried and pursued ‘critical
criticism 5 into its last lurking-place, put such enthusiasm into
his attack on the jugglers with ideas that he almost appeared
to be doing it for the sheer exhilaration of the thing, and to
the surprise of Engels, who failed to see that their opponents 5
nullity merited such profusion, filled more than three hundred
pages. The book appeared in February, 1845, under the title
of The Holy Family (by which was meant the three brothers,
Bruno, Edgar and Egbert Bauer) or the Critique of Critical
Criticism . It did not attract much attention. Bruno Bauer
and his followers had reduced themselves to absurdity and
nobody took any more notice of them.
96 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Engels found the Germany he Returned to very different
from the Germany he had left. Increasing impoverishment of
wide masses of artisans and home-workers; the rapid spread
of pauperisation, of which hitherto people had only read in
sentimental French novels and pamphlets which were not
taken very seriously; the rising of the weavers, the first move-
ments among the industrial workers, all entirely new features
in the picture that educated society, leading its own life, had
formed of Germany, troubled and disturbed the bourgeoisie
and forced them to face the problems that had arisen. A wave
of strikes passed over Germany in 1844. Workers in the calico
factories in Berlin rose in insurrection, railway workers in
Westphalia did the same. There were strikes in Saxony,
Hamburg and elsewhere. People discovered that there was
something rumbling down below, something with a menace.
That something was millions of people, of whom at most
the police had taken notice of before. What had been dis-
covered was the existence of the proletariat.
Pamphlets appeared giving recipes for overcoming ‘the
plague of the nineteenth century.’ Bettina von Arnim wrote
This Book Belongs to the King , in which she ruthlessly exposed
the distress in the so-called Vogtland, near Berlin. Philan-
thropical societies were formed, with the support of Frederick
William IV, ‘societies for the good of the working classes. 5
In East Prussia they remained what their founders intended
them to be, but in the western provinces Socialist-minded
intellectuals soon gained an entry to them. At Elberfeld,
Barmen, Cologne, Bielefeld, and elsewhere these societies
became Socialist propaganda centres, education centres of
and for the workers. It became necessary to dissolve the local
Berlin society as early as the autumn of 1844.
The first German Socialist papers appeared at the same time
— the W estfalische Dampfboot at Bielefeld, the Gesellschaftsspiegel
at Elberfeld, the Sprecher at Hamm and others. The word
‘Socialist 5 should not be understood in the sense in which it
is understood to-day. Socialism meant sympathy with the
suffering masses, indignation at injustice, appeal to man’s
nobler instincts, and belief in a better world. The descriptions
of the lives of the workers which those newspapers contained
are still valuable to-day. They shook the conscience of all
THE LIFE-LONG FRIEND 97
whose sensibilities had not grown blunted. A Communist at
that time was not much more than a resolute opponent of
poverty, hunger and mass-distress.
Former contributors to the Rheinische fitting, like Moses
Hess and D’Ester, were prominent among these Socialists-
by-compassion. Engels flung himself enthusiastically into
propaganda work. The way to the workers was closed to
him. The authorities would not have allowed him to
agitate for Communism among the workers. At the best
he could only have spoken to very small groups. But
for the time being Engels did not believe that kind of
work to be so very necessary. He still pinned all his hopes
to principles to which the intellectuals must be won over
first.
In the winter of 1844-5 the victory of Communism seemed
to him to be only a question of a few years, possibly even
months. He wrote to Marx that the propaganda being
carried out in Cologne was tremendous; there were marvellous
fellows at Diisseldorf, there were Communists at Elberfeld and
at Barmen even the commissary of police was a Communist.
If they could only get to work directly on the people, they
would soon be on top. Everyone, from rich to poor, came to
the Communist meetings. Nor were their activities without
success. Whichever way you turned you stumbled upon a
Communist. ‘Communism is the sole subject of conversation,
and new adherents come to us every day. In the Wuppertal
Communism is a reality, almost actually a power in the land. 5
The whole unreality of the movement is revealed by the
phrase: ‘The proletariat is busy, we do not know what with,
and we can hardly know. 5
Engel’s position at Barmen gradually became untenable.
The police started taking a very definite interest in his activities,
and he had to reckon with the prospect of being arrested,
possibly by the Communist commissary of police himself.
Life with his family was ‘a real dog’s life.’ All his father’s
religious fanaticism was re-awakened and Engel’s emergence
as a Communist stirred him to ‘a glowing bourgeois fanaticism’
besides. ‘You have no idea of the maliciousness of the Christian
heresy hunt after my soul,’ he wrote to Marx in Brussels. ‘My
father only needs to discover the existence of the Critical
7
98 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Criticism book to turn me out of the house altogether. . . .
It is no longer to be borne.’
Marx’s insistence on his friend’s joining him in Brussels
so that they might continue their common labours became
more urgent than ever. At the beginning of April, 1845,
Engels went to Brussels.
CHAPTER IX
CLARIFICATION
‘After we had passed a night in Brussels, almost the first
thing Marx said to me [H. Burgers] in the morning was:
“We must go and see Freiligrath to-day. He is here, and I
must make good the wrong the Rheinische £eitung did him
before he stood ‘on the party battlements. 5 His confession of
faith has wiped out everything. 55 5
Ferdinand Freiligrath stood out by a head from the teeming
multitude of German poets. His exotic poems, of equal rank
to their prototype, Victor Hugo’s Les Orientates , glowed
with passion, luxuriated in wild visions, and were technically
flawless. The young people of Germany received them with
enthusiasm. The effect they had on the young Engels has
already been noted. About the year 1840 Freiligrath was the
most popular poet in Germany. Devoted to the ideal of ‘pure
art, 5 he held it to be unworthy of tfye poet to descend into
the contemporary arena. His verses:
The poet stands on a high watch-tower
As on the party battlements 1
were later quoted to satiety. He had no objection to accepting
the pension of three hundred thalers which Frederick William
IV granted him in 1842 at the suggestion of Alexander von
Humboldt. He wrote an open letter attacking Herwegh for
wishing to bring poetry down to the level of the handmaiden
of politics. His ambition seemed to be to become the court
poet of Berlin.
This brought the Rheinische Zjeitung down on him with a
vengeance. It mercilessly derided the ‘pensioned poet. 5 In
Marx’s opinion Freiligrath was ‘an enemy of Herwegh’s and
of freedom. 5
A year later Freiligrath was in the revolutionary camp.
The cry for freedom that swept across Germany like a wave
1 Der Dichter steht auf einer hoh'ren Warte
Als auf den %innen der Partei .
99
100
KARL MARX*. MAN AND FIGHTER
awakened the dreamer. In 1844 the censor forbade the
publication of his Patriotic Fantasies . Freiligrath, without
troubling about the censor, published them under another
title, Confession of Faith , and renounced his much-talked of
‘pension 5 in the preface. The book was banned. Freiligrath
escaped arrest by fleeing to Belgium.
He remained in Belgium for a few months only. They
sufficed for him to form a friendship with Marx, ‘that nice,
interesting, unassuming, resolute fellow, 5 as he called him.
Freiligrath’s poetic powers reached their zenith in the revolu-
tionary years of 1848 and 1849 and he was one of Marx’s
closest collaborators on the JVeue Rheinische Zjeitung. Their
friendship defied all the vicissitudes 8f life and survived a
number of temporary estrangements during the hard years of
exile in London. Freiligrath was one of the few men whom
Marx ‘loved as friends in the highest sense of the word. 5
Marx met only a few German exiles in Brussels. In this
‘disagreeable mongrel country 5 as Freiligrath called Belgium,
the Germans did not feel at home, and in Brussels they were
not liked. Three years later, when Marx was expelled by the
anti-revolutionary government, his expulsion, to quote Engels,
‘helped to mitigate Belgian hatred of the Germans. 5
There were not many exiles from other countries either.
But small as the colony of exiles was, it was an important one.
During those years a political refugee could lead a more
secure life in Belgium than in any other European country,
not even excluding Switzerland. When Buonarotti, the fellow-
conspirator of Babeuf, had to flee from Geneva at the beginning
of the Restoration, Belgium was the only country to offer him
a refuge. He lived there until the revolution of 1830 and
wrote his famous work on the Conspiracy of the Equals , the bold
attempt of Babeuf and his comrades to plant the banner of
Socialism in Paris when the great Revolution ended. The
book had an influence far wider than the borders of Belgium
and France. It had a strong influence on the ‘physical force 5
Chartists. Exile set its seal upon men of Buonarotti’s type.
In Belgium were refugees to whom the rest of Europe was
shut — French Blanquists, Polish Democrats, German Repub-
licans, emigres of the second and third generation.
Belgium received them all and suffered them to remain
CLARIFICATION
IOI
upon her soil, as long as they refrained from direct political
activity. The small country had fought for and gained its
independence only a few years before; it was not yet firmly
in the saddle and it very intelligibly fought shy of diplomatic
conflicts with its powerful neighbours. These would have
been inevitable if the exiles had been allowed to carry out
propaganda from Belgium, and the attempt would have cost
the refugees their sanctuary. Thus, although the Press was
freer than in France, there was no ‘emigrant’ paper or organ-
isation. This state of affairs survived until the outbreak of the
February revolution, when the atmosphere changed throughout
the whole of Europe, and the Liberals came into power in
Belgium — and then not for long.
Marx became acquainted with the peculiarities of Belgium
during the first days after his arrival. The Prussian Govern-
ment soon reconciled itself to the withdrawal of the expulsion
of Ruge, Bornstein and the others who were to have left France
with Marx, but it continued to persecute Marx. Scarcely had
he arrived in Brussels when the Prussian ambassador demanded
his expulsion. Marx applied for a permit soon after his arrival.
He did not obtain it. Only after many inquiries did he find
out that such an application did not suffice. He had to give
a written undertaking to the s Arete publique to print nothing in
Belgium about contemporary politics. After that he obtained
his permit. Infuriated by the renewed persecution, tired of
the struggle with ‘his’ officials, who wasted time he could have
employed profitably, full of contempt for his reactionary
Fatherland, ‘the backward colony of Russia/ in December,
1845, he renounced his Prussian nationality.
He did not find the renunciation of journalistic activity hard
to bear. He had other activities in mind. In the foreword to
The Holy Family , written in September, 1844, he and Engels
had announced that after completing their demolition of Bruno
Bauer they would state their own constructive position to the
new philosophical and social doctrines in independent works.
Marx planned to write a two-volume Critique of Politics and
Political Economy , for which he had arranged a contract with
Leske, the Darmstadt publisher, before he left Paris. As soon
as he had settled down in Brussels he flung all his energy into
the task. In January Engels was urging him to complete the
102
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
book quickly, even if he should be dissatisfied with it himself.
Engels declared that it was essential that the work be finished
before April. Men’s minds were ripe for it, and they must
strike while the iron was hot. This formula was to be fre-
quently repeated during the next twenty years. Again and
again Engels was to urge his friend to write ‘finis’ to the work
in hand, stop his everlasting ploughing through books and
collecting of material, and actually get down to the work of
writing. Engels later confessed that while they were in
Brussels together Marx taught him for the first time what hard
work really meant. Marx’s thoroughness, the vigour with
which he grappled with a subject, not letting it go till he had
mastered it in all its details, the conscientiousness with which
he would read through everything that had ever been written
about it, were alien to Engels’s temperament. The Critique of
Politics and Political Economy was meant to appear in the summer
of 1845. The first volume, The Critique of Political Economy ,
appeared in the summer of 1859, and the first volume of Capital
in the autumn of 1867.
Once more Marx plunged into a sea of books. He read and
made excerpts from the economists Buret, Sismondi, Senior,
A. Blanqui, Ure, Rossi and Pecchio, to name the most im-
portant only. In the summer of 1845 went to Manchester
with Engels to study the English economists, Petty, Tooke,
Thompson, Cobbett and others, who were not available in
Brussels. In addition to all this he planned to collaborate with
Engels in publishing a whole series of important Socialist books
in German translations — the principal works of Fourier, Owen
and others. Marx was to write introductions for the French
authors and Engels for the English ones.
But in the summer of 1845 a new task intervened. Marx
informed his publisher that he had to break off work on the
Critique of Politics and Political Economy . It appeared to him to
be of vital immediate importance to attack German philosophy
and state his positive attitude to the present and past position
of German Socialism. This was necessary in order to prepare
the public for a system of economics which was diametrically
opposed to German preconceptions of the time.
During the lifetime of Marx and Engels this work never
appeared. Excerpts from the manuscript were only published
CLARIFICATION
IO3
in various places years after their death. When, thanks to the
tireless researches of D. B. Riazanov, it finally appeared in its
complete form in 1932, it was found that German Ideology was
Marx’s and Engels’s first exposition of their interpretation of
history — historical materialism — carried out in a detail for
which they never found time or opportunity again. When
Marx published his Critique of Political Economy in 1859, he
contented himself with preparing the public for the new view-
point with a few sentences in the foreword. A decade and a
half had passed since he had arrived at it, jointly with Engels,
and he had used it as a guiding thread through all his works
and could well believe that it was intelligible to all who could
read and only required a final and definite formulation. But
if one looks back now at the endless controversies that have
centred round the correct interpretation of historical material-
ism, one cannot help deploring that German Ideology found no
publisher in 1846.
In his reminiscences of the origins of the Communist League
Engels states that Marx had developed the main outlines of his
materialist interpretation of history by the time he joined him in
Brussels in spring, 1845. The two friends decided to elaborate
jointly the antithesis between their views and the ideological
background of German philosophy. This purpose was to be
carried out in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy.
It was impossible to carry it out otherwise at the time, not only
because it was the only way in which Marx and Engels could
come to terms with their previous philosophic conscience, but
because in the intellectual and historical conditions of the
forties the quintessence of their case, namely the proposition
that it is not man’s mind that conditions his being but, on the
contrary, his social being that conditions his mind, could be
stated most effectively and with the most far-reaching conse-
quences in the field of political action in the form of a contro-
versy with idealism and in that form only.
More than half of the two solid octavo volumes that Marx
and Engels wrote between September, 1845, an< 3 August, 1846,
is taken up with a refutation of Max Stirner, the theorist of
individual anarchism. Marx took up the cudgels with Stirner
with real delight. He took ‘the schoolmaster’ sentence by
sentence and harried him until nothing was left of the atheistic
104 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
‘egoist’ but a beer-swilling Berlin philistine. He was no less
pitiless in his exposure of the ‘true’ Socialism which had
recently become fashionable in Germany and deemed itself
superior to ‘crude 5 Communism. He revealed it as an insipid
brew of German philosophical phrases blended with half-
understood propositions borrowed from French Socialist and
Communist systems by philanthropic litterateurs who failed to
understand the movement of which these systems were the
expression. The fight against this kind of idealistic rubbish in
all its forms was all the more necessary because in Germany
social contradictions were not yet as developed as they were
in France and England, and in that phrase-intoxicated land
phrases were correspondingly dangerous. The only philo-
sopher who deserved respect was Ludwig Feuerbach.
Marx’s pithiest condensation of his theory of history made at
that time was in a letter to a Russian friend, Paul Annenkov.
His criticism of Proudhon was in reality a criticism of historical
idealism. Marx wrote:
‘What is society, whatever its form may be? The product of
the inter-actions of men. Are men free to choose this or that
social form? Not in the least. Take any particular stage in
the development of the productive forces of man and you will
find a corresponding form of trade and consumption. Take
definite stages in the development of production, trade, con-
sumption, and you have a corresponding form of social consti-
tution, a definite organisation of family, rank or classes, in
a word a corresponding form of civil society. Take such a
civil society and you have a definite political situation, which
is only the official expression of civil society.
‘It remains to add that men are not free masters of their
forces of production — the foundation of their whole history —
because these forces are acquired, are the product of previous
activity. Thus the forces of production are the result of man’s
practical energy, but this energy is itself conditioned by the
circumstances in which men are placed by the forces of pro-
duction already acquired by them, by the social forms existing
before them, which they themselves have not created but are
the product of the previous generation. From the simple fact
that each generation finds itself confronted with forces of
production acquired by the preceding one, which serves it as
CLARIFICATION
105
the raw material for new forces of production, it follows that
there is a continuity in the history of mankind, and a history of
mankind which is all the more his history because his forces
of production and consequently his social relationships have
grown in the meantime. The necessary consequence is that
the social history of men is always only the history of their
individual development, alike whether they are conscious of it
or not. Their material relationships form the foundation of all
their relationships. These material relationships are only the
necessary forms in which their material and individual activity
is fulfilled. . . . The economic forms under which men pro-
duce, consume, exchange, are transient and historical . With
newly acquired forces of production men alter their methods
of production, and with their methods of production they alter
their economic conditions, which were purely and simply the
necessary conditions of these definite methods of produc-
tion. . . . Proudhon has understood very well that men make
cloth, linen, silk. What Proudhon has not understood is that
men produce the social relationships in which they produce the
cloth and the linen in conformity with their capacity. Still
less has Proudhon understood that men, who produce social
relationships in conformity with their material productivity,
also produce ideas and categories , that is to say, the ideal, abstract
expressions of these same social relationships. Accordingly
categories are just as little eternal as the conditions the expres-
sion of which they are. For Proudhon, on the contrary, it is
categories and abstractions that are the primary facts. In his
opinion it is these and not men who make history. ... As
for him the driving forces are categories, there is no need to
alter practical life to alter the categories. On the contrary, if
one alters the categories, alterations in real life will follow.’
The last of the Theses on Feuerbach , which Marx wrote in his
notebook, says:
‘ The philosophers have qnl y interpreted the world differently J
The task is now to change it.’
At the beginning of May, 1846, Marx and Engels sent the
greater part of the manuscript to Germany. They had found
some prosperous adherents of ‘true’ Socialism in Westphalia
who had thought of publishing the work. But business diffi-
culties, whether real or alleged can no longer be determined,
106 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
intervened. Marx tried in vain to find another publisher. In
spite of all his efforts and those of Joseph Weydemeyer, a former
Prussian artillery lieutenant who had become a Communist
and visited Marx in Brussels in 1846, the book remained un-
published. In retrospect it seemed to Marx that the impossi-
bility of publishing a work to which he had devoted a year of his
life had not extraordinarily disturbed him. At the time, how-
ever, he bore the blow heavily. But it all lay a long time
behind him when he wrote: ‘We left the manuscript to the
nibbling criticism of mice all the more willingly as we had
attained our chief aim — clarification.’
CHAPTER X
FACE TO FACE WITH PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM
Neither the old Communist Utopias nor nebulous specula-
tions of the type of Hess’s ‘theory’ of the various roles of the
different countries in the revolution — which, incidentally,
Engels himself adopted for a time — could survive in the face
of the new interpretation of history. Communism in Germany
and France and Chartism in England no longer appeared
accidental events which might just as well not have happened
at all, or as ideas which could be measured against other ideas,
or as systems which could be considered and accepted or re-
jected from an absolute, timeless, moral or logical standpoint.
They now appeared, to use Engels’s words, as movements of
the oppressed proletarian class, as forms, more developed or
less, of their historically necessary struggle against the ruling
class, the bourgeoisie. Communism no longer meant imagina-
tively concocting an if-possible complete social ideal, but an
understanding of the nature, conditions and consequent aims
of the struggle of the proletariat.
Communism was no longer a doctrine but a movement. It
no longer proceeded from principles, from the humanism of the
Young Hegelians or of Feuerbach, but from facts. In so far as
it was theoretical, it was the theoretical expression of the
position of the proletariat in the class-struggle between prole-
tariat and bourgeoisie and the theoretical comprehension of the
conditions for attaining the freedom of the proletariat.
Marx and Engels had established their views scientifically
on the basis of German philosophical theory. It was now
equally essential for them to win over the European, and first
of all the German, working class to their point of view. ‘We
set about the task as soon as we had reached clarification,’
Engels relates. The overthrowing of primitive Communism
was the first and most urgent aim.
Wilhelm Weitling came to London in September, 1844.
The sufferings and persecution he had undergone for his
Communist ideals had increased his already considerable
107
108 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
renown. He had been arrested by the Swiss authorities in the
summer of 1843 and indicted for blasphemy, making attacks
on the rights of property and forming a secret society for the
spreading of Communism. He was imprisoned for four
months on remand, condemned to a further six months in gaol
by the Zurich court and, at the conclusion of his sentence, was
delivered over the Prussian frontier in chains. His trial and
still more the official report on ‘The Communists in Switzerland
according to the papers found in Weitling’s possession’ attracted
attention far beyond the borders of Switzerland. The wide
publicity given to his case caused many people to hear of the
Communist movement and of Communism for the first time.
Where the distribution of Communist literature was impossible
the official report, which everybody could buy, with its copious
extracts from Weitling’s writings, was not a bad substitute.
This gifted young writer — at once a poet and a philoso-
phising tailor’s assistant — received universal sympathy. He
wrote his Gaol Poems in prison. Even the Prussian Government
was aware of the prevailing mood, and although the Swiss
authorities delivered him up to them as a fugitive from military
service, when he was found unfit they let him go free. But
after a few months he had once more made himself so unpopular
with the police that he was arrested again and sent off to
Hamburg, where Heine saw him. ‘My legs have no aptitude
to carry iron rings like those Weitling bore,’ he wrote. ‘He
showed me the marks.’
From Hamburg Weitling went on to London, where his
German comrades enthusiastically received him. A big cele-
bration was held in his honour on September 22, in co-opera-
tion with the Chartists and the refugees from France. But the
jubilation and the tumult died away, and before six months
had passed the contradictions that had long been forming
within the movement led to an open rupture.
During the years in which Weitling wrote his Mankind as it
is and as it ought to be and was developing the ideas he expressed
in his most mature work, Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom ,
all the leaders of the League of the Just had been living in
Paris. After the rising of May 12, 1839, they scattered.
Weitling went to Switzerland, Schapper, Heinrich Bauer and
Moll found refuge in England. The small Communist groups
FACE TO FACE WITH PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM IOg
in Switzerland lost themselves more and more in sentimental
Primitive Christian Communism and romantic plotting.
Weitling, separated from his old friends, surrounded by back-
ward artisans in a backward country, soon abandoned himself
entirely to primitive Utopianism and highly irrational flights
of fancy. It was different with those members of the League
who went westwards. They came under the influence of
Chartism, at the time the most advanced workers 5 movement
in the world. They established friendly relations with the
Chartist leaders, read the Chartist Press, and contributed to it
themselves. The longer they lived in England the more they
shook themselves free from their primitive equalitarian Com-
munism. In 1843, when Weitling started talking of the
communalisation of women and concocted a hare-brained
scheme for forming an army of forty thousand thieves and
robbers who were to bring the exploiters to their knees by means
of a pitiless guerilla warfare, they firmly protested against such
folly.
Imprisonment had disordered Weitling’s mind more than
ever. After the Zurich trial he completely lost all sense of
proportion. His outward fame seemed to confirm his own
conviction that he had been chosen as the teacher, leader and
saviour of mankind, to free it from all its misery and suffering.
The ‘Londoners 5 and Weitling had to part.
The dispute flared up over the London German Workers 5
Union. The Union had been founded in February, 1840, by
Schapper and six other members of the League of the Just as
a legal organisation to serve as a screen for the League. The
League made use of this kind of organisation everywhere. The
statutes of the London German Workers 5 Union, printed as a
special pamphlet, became the pattern for all organisations of
the same kind founded by members of the League everywhere
where German workers lived and legal organisations of this or
a similar kind were possible. The chief purpose of these
Unions was propaganda, and in addition they provided
benefits for sick comrades. It did not take long for the Union
to become the centre of the German workers 5 colony in London.
In addition to Germans it had among its members Scandi-
navians, Dutch, Hungarians, Czechs, southern Slavs and
Russians, nationalities which were of admirable service to the
no
KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
Germans in their contacts with other countries. In 1847 an
English Grenadier Guardsman in uniform was a regular
visitor. At the time the Union reached its zenith, on the eve
of the revolution of 1848, it had between four and five hundred
members, a more than respectable total for the time. The life
of the Union was described in a letter by Hugo Hildebrand,
the political economist, who visited it in April, 1846.
‘About half-past eight we went to the Union premises in a
spirit of considerable expectancy/ he wrote. c On the ground-
floor there was an ordinary shop, in which porter and other
beers were sold. I did not notice any special place reserved
for visitors. We went through the shop and upstairs into a
hall-like room, capable of seating about two hundred men at
the tables and benches distributed about the floor. About
twenty men were sitting about in groups, eating a simple
supper or smoking one of the pipes of honour (which lay on all
the tables) with a beer-mug in front of them. Others were
standing about. Every moment the door opened to admit
newcomers, so that it was clear that the meeting was only due
to begin later. One saw from their faces that most of the men
belonged to the working class, although all were thoroughly
decently clothed and an easy and unaffected but thoroughly
decorous tone prevailed. The language was predominantly
German, but French and English were also to be heard. At
one end of the hall there was a grand-piano, with music, which
in unmusical London was the best proof that we had found the
right room. As we knew no one present we sat down at a
table near the door. Very little notice was taken of us. We
ordered a glass of porter and the usual penny packet of tobacco
and awaited our host and acquaintance, Schappcr. It was
not long before a big, strong, healthy-looking man of about
thirty-six, with a black moustache and a commanding manner,
came up to Diefenbach (Hildebrand’s companion). He was
promptly introduced to me as Schapper, the former Frankfurt
demagogue, who later took part in campaigns, or rather
revolutions, in Switzerland and Spain. He was very serious
on the occasion of my meeting him, but friendly, and I could
feel that he looked down at my professional status with a
certain inner pride.’
What Engels, looking back at the early years of the
FACE TO FACE WITH PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM III
movement forty years later, said about Schapper, Heinrich Bauer
and Moll, the three men who took such an important part in
the birth of the Communist League, may be stated with
advantage here. Engels remembered Schapper as a giant in
stature, resolute and energetic, always ready to risk his life
and bourgeois well-being, an ideal professional revolutionary
of the type characteristic of the thirties. In spite of a certain
ponderousness of thought, he was by no means inaccessible to
better theoretical understanding than his own, to compensate
for which he only held on the more grimly to what he had once
grasped. Hence his intelligence was sometimes carried away
by his revolutionary zeal. But he always saw his mistakes
afterwards and candidly admitted them. Heinrich Bauer came
from Franconia and was a bootmaker. He was a lively,
spritely, witty little man, concealing a great deal of shrewdness
and determination in his small frame. Finally Joseph Moll, a
Cologne watchmaker, a middle-sized Hercules, was at least the
equal of his comrades in energy and determination and was
superior to them in intelligence. He was a born diplomat,
besides being more accessible to theoretical understanding.
Hildebrand continues:
‘Schapper invited us to sit down with him at one end of the
hall and showed me a notice-board on which the Union regula-
tions were displayed. They were under the heading of “Ger-
man Workers’ Educational Union.” Anyone who earned his
living honestly and had nothing dishonourable against him
was eligible for membership, but every application for member-
ship had to be proposed and seconded by a member. The
Union officials were a president, a secretary, a librarian and a
treasurer. Members were divided into two classes: (i) those
who constituted a Communist club of their own, conditions for
membership of which were as described and (2) other members
who took part in the educational activities of the Union only.
Only the first category could take part in meetings at which
voting took place, elect officers and vote on the admission of
new members. The others only took a passive part in the
Union activities, took part in none of the Communist meetings
proper and only paid contributions, and fines if they missed
any of the educational meetings. The basic idea of the Union
was that man could only attain liberty and self-knowledge by
1 12 KARL MARX.* MAN AND FIGHTER
the cultivation of his mind. For this reason evefcy evening was
devoted to instruction of one kind or another. The first
evening was devoted to study of the English language, the
second to geography, the third to history, the fourth to drawing
and physics, the fifth to singing, the sixth to dancing and the
seventh to Communist policy. The subjects of instruction were
changed every half-year. . . .
‘We took our seats at the indicated place. In the meantime
the hall had become crowded, and the president, of whom all
I know is that he was described to me as a doctor, opened the
meeting. After a solemn silence had been obtained and every-
one had taken his pipe out of his mouth, the secretary, a
tailor’s assistant, whose descriptive powers were really enviable,
read out a notice to the effect that Citizen Hildebrand and
Citizen Diefenbach had been introduced as guests by Citizen
Schapper and asked whether any citizen had any objection.
After that attention was turned to current events and Citizen
Schapper made a report on the events of the week. His report
was very eloquent, thorough and informative. It was evident
that he and the club conducted a very widespread corre-
spondence; for he reported the contents of a letter from Madrid
which contained news of the fall of the military despotism, due
to Christina’s hierarchist tendencies, at greater length and in
far greater detail than had yet appeared in any newspaper.
A strong Communist colouring was naturally evident through-
out, and the theme of the proletariat ran like a red thread
through the entire discourse. I candidly admit that I can
stand a good dose of Liberalism, but in some places my hair
stood on end. . . .
‘The whole speech made a great impression on the audience
and was followed by general and continuous applause. Next
the minutes of the last Communist meeting, at which the
objectionableness of the Christian religion was dealt with, were
read by the secretary.
‘After this a fresh subject came up for discussion, namely the
question of what arrangements were to be made for the educa-
tion of children in the Communist State. During the course
of the discussion I discovered to my amazement that at least
half of those present were married men. Unfortunately the
debate did not get much beyond the initial stages; consequently
FACE TO FACE WITH PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM II3
all I found out to satisfy my curiosity was that they repudiated
alike the communalisation of wives and the emancipation of
women, and considered woman as the mental complement of
man and marriage as a moral institution, in which both parties
enjoyed equal rights, although the capacities, disposition and
sphere of activity of man and woman were completely different.
Education must be mental and physical, private and political
and must actually begin before birth.
c As it was past midnight by this time, further consideration
of these matters was postponed to the following week. Next I
had a very serious private discussion with Schapper about his
hostility to Liberalism, spoke to a few other members, including
a Silesian joiner, inspected the Union library and bought some
Communist pamphlets. . . . The meeting dispersed in a very
friendly and good-tempered spirit, so that the prevalent use of
the second person singular did seem not just to spring from the
club rules but to be rooted in the members’ hearts. 5
These German workers attentively followed political events
not only in England where they lived and in Germany which
was their home; their view took in the whole of Europe.
Weitling’s realm was not of this world. The only distinction
that he recognised was that between the present, which he
utterly rejected, and a glittering future. All else was evil.
Schapper and his friends were patiently seeking a way for
themselves along the thorny path of conflicting parties and
systems. Their guide was reason. Weitling followed his feel-
ings only. He took his stand on the Bible, on Love, the Noble
and the Good. In his opinion the people were long since ripe
for the new social order, and the only remaining task was to
free them from their oppressors, for which all that was required
was the determined initiative of a revolutionary organisation,
a small band of resolute brothers. The obsolete old world
must be crushed at a blow by the dictatorship of a revolution-
ary minority who would act in the interests of the latently
revolutionary masses and shrink at nothing to attain their ends.
One almost seems to hear the voice of Bakunin, with whom
Marx was forced to repeat the same struggle twenty years later,
in the following phrases of Weitling, which date from 1845:
Tn my opinion/ Weitling said, ‘everybody is ripe for Com-
munism, even the criminals. Criminals are a product of the
8
1 14 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
present order of society and under Communism they would
cease to be criminals. Humanity is of necessity always ripe for
revolution, or it never will be. The latter is nothing but the
phraseology of our opponents. If we follow them we shall have
no choice but to lay our hands on our knees and wait till
roasted pigeons fly into our mouths. 5
These words of Weitling’s were spoken at a meeting at the
German Workers’ Union at the end of June, 1845. Since the
beginning of the year regular weekly meetings had been held
at which the fundamental questions of Communism were dis-
cussed. The extent of the breach between their old comrade-
in-arms and themselves had gradually become clear to the
members of the Union. They found it far from easy to break
with their own past. Personally attached to their leader as
they were, they went on trying to reconcile the incompatible,
to find a middle way. They almost apologised for their
secession, but the parting could no longer be postponed.
Schapper, their spokesman, said in his reply to Weitling that
he himself had spoken in just the same way eight, even six
years ago. But now, tempered as he was by so much bitter
experience, he was compelled to express agreement with the
reactionary phrase; the people were not yet ripe; for if they
were ripe, such a phrase would no longer be possible. He
ended his speech by saying that truth could not be knocked
into people’s heads with rifle-butts.
The London German workers all honoured Weitling and his
candid opinions, but they decided for Schapper by an over-
whelming majority. Weitling could not get over his defeat.
He was unable to follow Schapper’s reasoning even a little way.
He left London, angered and embittered, suspecting intrigue
and treachery.
Engels had met the leading members of the Union in 1843.
In the summer of 1845, when he and Marx were in London, he
renewed the acquaintance and introduced Schapper, Bauer
and Moll, who had made a ‘tremendous impression’ on him
two years before as the first revolutionary proletarians he had
ever met, to Marx. It is impossible from the scanty material
that has survived to say whether Marx attended a meeting of
the Union or not, but he certainly paid great attention to the
progress of the controversy with Weitling. He set the greater
FACE TO FACE WITH PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM I 1 5
store by it in that it cleared the way from below for his own
special task of breaking scientific Socialism adrift from senti-
mental Communism, philosophising, and ‘principles. 5 His
most urgent practical aim was that of setting the movement on
the right track and accelerating its development.
The Union had one institution which would be useful for
his purpose. This was the active correspondence it kept up
with members in other countries. These sent in fairly regular
reports concerning political events in the countries to which
they had emigrated, in so far as these events concerned the
workers. It must be possible, Marx decided, to make a per-
manent institution of the Union’s correspondence with its
members, extend it to all groups and representatives of the
Communist and Socialist movement and thereby bring it to
a higher level. However desirable the sending in of reports
might be, the clarifying of views was more important still.
This purpose should be served by written contact maintained
between individual countries and within the countries them-
selves.
Marx, with Brussels as his headquarters, set about founding
his correspondence committees in the spring of 1846. As a
complement to these he planned to start a newspaper in which
questions concerning the movement were to be ventilated from
every point of view. The tasks that Marx meant the corre-
spondence committees to fulfil — for a long time their object
and nature defied the efforts of research — were indicated in a
letter of Marx to Proudhon, dated May 5, 1846, which was
found a few years ago. Marx wrote: £ Conjointement avec deux
de mes amis Frederic Engels et Philippe Gigot ( tons deux d Bruxelles)
j 9 ai organist avec les communistes et socialistes allemands une corre-
spondence suivie, qui devra s' occuper et de la discussion de questions
scientifiques et de la surveillance a exercer sur les ecrits populaires et la
propagande socialiste y qu on peut faire en Allemagne par ce moyen .
Le but principal de notre correspondence sera pourtant celui , de mettre
les socialistes allemands en rapport avec les socialistes frangais et
anglais , de tenir les Strangers au courant des mouvements socialistes
qui seront operes en Allemagne et d' informer les Allemands en Allemagne
des progres du socialisme en France et en Angleterre. De cette maniire
des differences d 9 opinion pourront se fair jour; on arrivera d un echange
d 9 idees et d une critique impartiale. C 9 est Id un pas y que le mouvement
Il6 KARL MARX: man and fighter
social aura fait dans son expression litteraire ajin de se debarrasser des
limites de la nationality. Et au moment de V action, il est certaine -
ment d'un grand inter it pour chacun , d'itre instruit de Vetat des
affaires d Vetranger aussi bien que chez lui .
'Outre les communistes en Allemagne notre correspondence com -
prendra aussi les socialistes allemands a Paris et d Londres. Nos
rapports avec VAngleterre sont dejd etablis; quant d la France nous
croyons tous que nous ne pouvons y trouver un meilleur correspondent
que vous. . . . 51
Proudhon, however, declined the invitation. He would very
much like to give his aid when things got going, he said, but in
the meantime he held it to be superfluous. Of the French
Socialists Louis Blanc alone seems to have got into touch with
the Brussels committee. In England G. Harney declared him-
self willing to co-operate, though he does not seem to have been
very active. Quite an animated correspondence was carried
on with Schapper and his friends, and several members of the
Paris section of the League of the Just, particularly Ewerbeck,
co-operated. Little is known of the contacts made with
Communists in Germany, but there was correspondence with
Silesia, with the Wuppertal, where Kottgen, a painter, was
active, with Kiel, where Georg Weber, a doctor, conducted
propaganda, and from Cologne. The Communists of Cologne,
under the leadership of Roland Daniels, a doctor and a
personal friend of Marx’s, at first declined the invitation to
found a correspondence committee as premature but later sent
reports to Brussels all the same. On the whole this very loose
organisation of correspondence committees did not achieve
1 Together with two of my friends, Friedrich Engels and Philippe Gigot (both
of whom are in Brussels) I have organised a regular correspondence with the
German Communists and Socialists on scientific questions and the supervision of
such popular writing and Socialist propaganda as one may be able to carry out
in Germany by this means. The main object of our correspondence will, how-
ever, be to keep German Socialists in contact with French and English Socialists,
and keep foreigners informed about the Socialist movement in Germany and
inform the Germans in Germany of the progress of Socialism in France and
England in turn. In this way differences of opinion will come to light; ideas will
be exchanged and impartial criticism arrived at. This will be a step taken by the
Socialist movement on its literary side towards ridding itself of the limitations of
nationality. For at the moment of action it is certainly of great interest to every-
one to be informed of the state of affairs abroad as well as at home.
Beside the Communists in Germany our correspondence will include German
Socialists in Paris and London. Our relations with England are already estab-
lished; as for France we all believe that it would be impossible to find a better
correspondent than you.
FACE TO FACE WITH PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM II7
very much. It failed to gain a foothold outside German
Communist circles, the reports came in irregularly and contri-
buted practically nothing to the theoretical advancement of
Communism. But it did bring Marx into closer contact with
the London German Workers 5 Union, which was the most
important German Communist organisation, and in that
respect achieved its purpose.
The views of Schapper and his friends came ever closer to
those of Marx.
Weitling refused to have anything to do with this ‘new
system of propaganda. 5 With growing embitterment he
watched the dwindling of his prestige from day to day. The
free, loose form of this new organisation, which aimed at
attaining the co-operation of all Communists upon a basis of
scientific Communism, ran counter to all his fundamental pre-
conceptions, which refused to countenance anything but senti-
mental millenarianism and the tactics of the conspiratorial
secret society. His stay in England brought him not only dis-
appointment in the political field, but one personal failure after
another. He tried a number of schemes, not one of which
succeeded. His grandiose ideas, such as that for revolution-
ising science by means of ‘a general logical study of thought
and speech, 5 and for founding an artificial universal language,
roused no interest. Obviously intriguing intellectuals were to
blame. They barred his way to the publishers and to their
secret ‘sources of money. 5 Weitling had risen to fame in the
role of an accuser. His first writings had been the mighty cry
of resentment of the oppressed class from which he sprang, but
half-educated as he was and full of mistrust for the science of
‘this world, 5 as a discoverer of systems he descended into the
absurd. He was forced to look on while the London Com-
munists increasingly turned from him to follow Marx. He had .
had a short meeting with Marx in London in the summer of
1845, an d on his way back to the Continent at the beginning
of 1846 he stopped in Brussels. The Brussels correspondence
committee had just been founded, and in view of the prestige
Weitling still enjoyed an invitation to collaborate with the
committee could not be avoided. Marx invited him.
Two accounts are extant concerning the confrontation of
Marx and Weitling on March 30, 1846. One is a letter
Il8 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Weitling wrote to Moses Hess and the other a detailed account of
the affair by the Russian writer, Annenkov, who was very close
to Marx at the time and was introduced by him to the Com-
munists of Brussels. Annenkov gives the only living description
of Marx dating from those years, and it reproduces incom-
parably the atmosphere of the movement at the time. Thirty
years later Annenkov could still call up a vivid picture of what
young Marx was like on that spring evening in Brussels in 1846.
‘Marx was a type of man formed all of energy, force of will
and unshakable conviction, a type highly remarkable in out-
ward appearance as well. In spite of his thick, black mane of
hair, his hairy hands, and his coat buttoned up all awry, he
had the appearance of a man who has the right and the power
to demand respect, although his looks and his manners might
appear peculiar sometimes. His movements were angular, but
bold and confident, his manners were contrary to all social
practice. But they were proud, with a touch of disdain, and
his sharp voice, which rang like metal, sounded remarkably in
accordance with the radical judgments on men and things
which he let fall. He spoke only in the imperative, brooking
no contradiction, and this was intensified by the tone, which to
me was almost painfully jarring, in which he spoke. This tone
expressed the firm conviction of his mission to reign over men’s
minds and dictate their laws. Before my eyes stood the
personification of a democratic dictator such as might appear
before one in moments of fantasy.’
In comparison with him Weitling appeared almost spruce —
‘a handsome, fair young man in a somewhat foppishly cut coat,
with a foppishly trimmed beard.’ He looked more like a
commercial traveller than the gloomy, embittered worker,
oppressed by the burden of work and thought, whom Annenkov
had imagined.
Those present at the meeting were Engels, the Belgian,
Gigot, Edgar von Westphalen, Marx’s brother-in-law, Weyde-
meyer, Seiler, a German registrar who had fled from Germany,
and the journalist, Heilberg. These took their seats at a small
green table with Marx at the head of it, ‘pencil in hand, his
lion’s head bent over a sheet of paper.’ The question for dis-
cussion was what form propaganda should take in Germany.
Engels, ‘tall, straight, grave and looking like a distinguished
FACE TO FACE WITH PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM Iig
Englishman,’ rose and said how necessary it was to clarify
opposing views and settle on a general programme, but before
he had finished Marx, impatient and thirsting for battle, cut
him short with a direct question to Weitling. ‘But tell us,
Weitling,’ he said, ‘what are the arguments with which you
defend your social-revolutionary agitation and on what do you
intend to base it in the future?’ Annenkov stresses his remem-
brance of the exact form of this blunt question, which opened
a heated discussion in the little group round the green table.
Before this unaccustomed audience Weitling lost his usual
confidence and command of speech. He spoke indistinctly and
confusedly, kept on repeating himself, continually corrected
what he said and only made his points with difficulty. His
speeches consisted of ‘commonplaces of Liberal rhetoric.’ He
declined to create new economic theories, in his opinion the
doctrines of the French were ample and sufficient. The workers
must open their eyes, put faith in no promises and rest their
hopes upon themselves alone.
He would probably have gone on speaking a long time yet
if Marx, with angrily contracted brows, had not interrupted
him and started a sarcastic reply, the essence of which was that
to stir up the people without giving them firm foundations on
which to base their actions was a simple act of treachery. The
awakening of fantastic hopes led not to the saving of suffering
people but to their downfall. Trying to influence the workers,
in Germany especially, without a concrete teaching and strong,
scientific ideas was hollow, unscrupulous playing with propa-
ganda, like an enthusiastic apostle addressing a lot of open-
mouthed donkeys. ‘“Here,” he added, pointing suddenly to
me with a powerful gesture, “here is a Russian among us. In
his country, Weitling, perhaps there would be a place for your
role, in Russia alone, perhaps, can successful unions be arranged
between absurd apostles and absurd young men!”’ But in a
civilised country like Germany, Marx continued, nothing could
be achieved without a settled, concrete teaching, and nothing
had been achieved so far but noise, harmful excitement and
destruction of the very cause that had been undertaken.
In a letter Weitling wrote next day he summed up Marx’s
speech by saying that unsuitable people must at once be parted
from the ‘sources of money.’ It was his old illusion of an
120
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
intellectual coalition that caused him so thoroughly to mis-
understand Marx’s demand for a ‘sifting’ of the party. He
listened to Marx without understanding him. There could be
no talk of the immediate realisation of Communism, Marx had
said. The bourgeoisie must come to the helm first. How could
Weitling possibly understand that, Weitling who believed that
he could destroy the old form of society with forty thousand
bandits and build up a new society on the basis of Christian
virtue? An unbridgeable abyss separated him from the
Marxist interpretation of historical development. Marx said on
this occasion for the first time what he had to repeat again and
again in the next three years to those impatient souls who
believed that only will was needed to leap a whole economic
and therefore political epoch. Marx declared that the next
revolution in Europe would have to destroy the remnants of
feudalism, bring the Liberal and radical bourgeoisie into the
saddle and thus for the first time create the political conditions
for proletarian action. It was for this reason that Marx de-
manded the sifting of the party, the struggle against ‘philo-
sophical’ Communism and the Communism of the artisans.
Weitling understood that sentiment must be hooted from the
stage. He did not understand that Marx replaced crude senti-
ment by scientific understanding. When Marx demanded
that an end be put to ‘secret propaganda,’ that meant for
Weitling the end of the movement itself. He recognised only
one form of propaganda, that of the conspiratorial secret
society. Because he believed the masses to be unripe and
incapable of becoming ripe, he wanted and could want no
mass movement.
Marx’s criticism had struck Weitling in his weakest spot.
With the mistrust of the self-educated, he felt once more the
feared and hated pride of the intellectual. He replied that
analysis in the study and criticism carried out far from the
suffering world and the afflictions of the people accomplished
nothing. ‘At these words Marx struck the table angrily with
his fist, so powerfully that the lamp shook. He jumped to his
feet and exclaimed:
‘“Ignorance had never yet helped anybody!”
‘We followed his example and got up too. The conference
was over. While Marx was striding up and down the room in
FACE TO FACE WITH PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM 121
unusually angry excitement I quickly said good-bye to him and
the others and went home, greatly surprised by what I had
seen and heard. 5
The definite breach between Marx and Weitling did not
come till May, 1848. Weitling even sent Marx an article for
the paper he was going to start at the time, and he had no
objection to accepting the help which the ‘chief of the intel-
lectuals, 5 whom he alleged to be ‘sitting on the funds 5 though
he was in fact short of them, continued to give him.
But Marx insisted on the sifting of the party and the first
blow fell upon Hermann Kriege, a close friend of Weitling 5 s
and a man of the same way of thinking as he. Kriege, a young,
not ungifted man whom Engels had recommended to Marx
only a year before as a ‘splendid agitator, 5 had emigrated to
America, where he published a weekly paper, the People's
Tribune . His never very substantial and ‘emotional 5 Com-
munism degenerated in America into the most turgid senti-
mentalism. The People's Tribune only made Communism
ridiculous. On top of it Kriege applied quite indiscriminately
for financial support to people who had nothing whatever to
do with Communism. The Brussels group felt the time had
come to declare openly before the world that this activity had
nothing whatever to do with them. Many of them found it
hard to repudiate a man who had so recently been their com-
rade. But, as Marx and Engels stated in the circular letter
they drafted, the cause took precedence of everything else, the
party must not degenerate into a clique, and the party was
more important than the persons who belonged or had be-
longed to it. There were long discussions, and on May 11 the
group decided to make a public protest against Kriege’s out-
pourings. Weitling alone refused to sign. On May 16 the
lithographed circular was dispatched to the correspondence
committees in Germany, Paris, London and New York. On
the same day Weitling demanded the immediate return of his
manuscript from Marx. This was the final rupture.
CHAPTER XI
[THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE
The German Communists, though they criticised the harsh
wording of the circular, took Marx’s side. The Brussels com-
mittee thereupon demanded that "philosophical and senti-
mental’ Communism be combated outright. This hurt the
feelings of Schapper and his followers, who rebelled at the
"intellectual arrogance’ of the Brussels committee. They
claimed to be free from sentimental aspirations themselves, but
believed a milder attitude towards the ‘sentimental’ Commun-
ists, who after all meant well, to be preferable to the violence
with which Marx attacked them. Marx did not and could
not give in. If the small Communist elite did not have clear,
definite views, any attempt to influence the broad, working
masses was doomed to failure. Marx used his correspondence
with the German Communists in London, to which he attached
supreme importance, as he later wrote, ‘to subject to merciless
criticism in a series of partly printed, partly lithographed
pamphlets the medley of English and French Socialism or
Communism and German philosophy which then formed the
secret teaching of the League, and replace it by the only
tenable theoretical foundation, namely scientific insight into
the economic structure of bourgeois society; and, finally, to
explain in popular form that our task was not that of trying
to bring any kind of Utopian system into being but was that of
consciously participating in a historical revolutionary process
by which society was being transformed before our eyes.’
Where possible written propaganda was supplemented by
oral propaganda. Engels was particularly active in Paris,
where he settled in the middle of August, 1846.
Unwilling as the members of the League of the Just, both in
London and Paris, at first were to face the dilemma with which
Marx confronted them, namely, that of choosing between
scientific or Utopian Socialism, hard as it was for them to
renounce what they had held dear for so many years, they
nevertheless overcame their doubts and followed Marx. What
122
THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 123
they learned from him substantiated their own insight into
affairs, brought sense and coherence into their own experi-
ences, enabled them to understand the historical significance
of the English workers 5 movement, gave them the firm stand-
point that they needed. This does not imply that none of
them fell back again in later years. But in the two years in
question Marx won over the vanguard of the class for scientific
Socialism.
The central offices of the League of the Just remained in
Paris — mainly out of tradition, for the preponderating majority
of its members no longer lived in France — until the autumn of
1 846. The real headquarters were in London. Legal organisa-
tions of workers of the kind that Schapper and his comrades
had created in London were impossible in Paris, and France
had no mass movement like that of the Chartists in England,
not even in embryo. In Paris the old forms of the conspira-
torial secret society were still kept up. They did not correspond
to the needs of the rising working-class movement. The first
result of the Marxian criticism was the reorganisation of the
League of the Just. The officers of the club were re-elected
in autumn, 1846. Schapper and Moll and other ‘Londoners 5
became the leaders.
They felt the approach of the revolution which, in the words
of one of their circulars ‘would probably settle the fate of the
world for centuries. 5 They realised that their immediate task
must be to carry out Marx’s injunctions of a year before. They
must create a Communist Party programme and decide on
their tactics. A congress was to be held in London to do these
things. The proposal to hold it had been made by the London
correspondence committee in the summer of 1846. In Novem-
ber, 1846, a special circular letter was sent out, summoning
the representatives of all the branches of the League to a
Congress to be held on May 1, 1847.
Joseph Moll was entrusted with the task of getting into touch
with Marx and inviting him to join the League. Moll arrived
in Brussels at the beginning of February, 1847. He was
authorised to give Marx ‘an oral report on the state of affairs
(in the League of the Just) and receive information from him
in return. 5 After interviewing Marx in Brussels Moll went to
Paris and interviewed Engels. He explained in his own name
124 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
and that of his comrades that they were convinced of the
rightness of Marx’s views and agreed that they must shake off
the old conspiratorial forms and traditions. Marx and Engels
were to be invited to collaborate in the work of reorganisation
and theoretical re-orientation.
To Marx the invitation to enter the League was by no means
unexpected. If he hesitated to accept it it was because of his
appreciation of the power of tradition and his consequently
inevitable uncertainty about the genuineness of the League of
the Just’s determination fundamentally to reorganise itself.
Marx had kept away from the secret societies in Paris. Re-
pelled as he had been by their romanticism, which occasionally
expressed itself in the most ludicrous forms, standing as he did
a whole world apart from the doctrines of the insurrectionists
and the Utopians, now that he had recognised the historical
mission of the proletariat in all its immensity he had no choice
but decisively and once and for all to reject secret society
conspiratorialism as the method of organising the class move-
ment. But Moll stated that it was essential that he and Engels
should join the League if it were really to shake off all its
archaic shackles, and Marx overcame his doubts and joined
the League of the Just in February or. March, 1847.
The Congress met in London on June 1, 1847 (it had been
postponed for a month) . Engels was the delegate of the Paris
branch and Wilhelm Wolff came from Brussels. Marx stayed
in Brussels. His official reason was lack of funds for the
journey, and it appears from a letter that he did in fact attempt
unsuccessfully to raise the necessary sum. But money cannot
have been the decisive factor. If Marx had been really deter-
mined to take part in the Congress it would not have been
difficult for him to have persuaded the branch to send him
instead of the excellent but not outstanding Wolff. No doubt
the real explanation is the assumption that before associating
himself definitely with the League Marx wanted to await the
results of the Congress.
The Congress decided on a complete reorganisation of the
League. In place of the old name, to which any man could
attach any meaning he liked — this was actually encouraged
because there were only a few real initiates and to lead the
profane astray could not but be useful — a new name, the
THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 125
‘Communist League, 5 made its appearance. The statutes of
the League were entirely recast. The first sentence was: ‘The
aim of the League is the downfall of the bourgeoisie and the
ascendancy of the proletariat, the abolition of the old society
based on class conflicts and the foundation of a new society
without classes and without private property. 5 This was the
language of Marx. The whole organisation was built up in
the Marxian spirit. It was democratic throughout. Before
joining the League Marx and Engels had stipulated that
‘everything conducive to superstitious authoritarianism be
struck out of the rules. 5 All the officers of the League were
appointed by election and could be dismissed at any time by
those who had elected them. This alone constituted an effec-
tive barrier against machinations and intrigues of the kind
conducive to dictatorship, and the League was converted — at
any rate for ordinary times of peace — into a straightforward
propaganda organisation. The statutes were drafted and sent
back to the branches for discussion. They were accepted after
further deliberation by the second Congress in December.
Between now and the next Congress a statement of the
League’s programme, the League’s ‘profession of faith, 5 was to
be worked out. Before .parting the delegates also decided to
publish a periodical. The ‘trial number 5 of the Kommunistische
Zeitschrift, the only one that ever appeared, came out in
September, 1847. It was edited by the German Communists
in London, no doubt with Engels’s collaboration. The old
motto of the League of the Just had been ‘All men are brothers. 5
It was changed at Engels’s suggestion. Whether his reasons
for regarding the change as essential were the same as Marx’s
is not known. Marx declared that there was a whole mass of
men of ,whom he wished anything rather than to be their
brothers. The phrase that Engels proposed and the Congress
of the Communist League accepted appeared for the first time
on the badly printed little sheet on sale for twopence to German
workers at the White Hart Inn in Drury Lane in the autumn
of 1847. It was: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite! 5
Marx had been trying for a long time to get hold of a legal
newspaper in Germany through which he could express his
views. He thought out innumerable schemes and conducted
lengthy negotiations, all without success. German Socialist
126 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
papers competed for contributions from him and his friends,
and a few articles also appeared in the Rheinische Jahrbilcher ,
the Deutsches Biirgerbuch , the Gesellschaftsspiegel , the Westfalische
Dampfboot , and others. But Marx remained only an occasional
contributor, if a highly appreciated one. He had no power to
dictate the policy of any paper. Next to Engels’s articles and
his own there appeared others favouring the ‘true 5 socialism
which Marx was combating. The sharper the division
between the Marxian group and the others became, and the
better organised they grew, the more essential was it to have
a mouthpiece the policy of which should be determined by
them and them alone.
The German censorship made it impossible to start a news-
paper in Germany. It must appear abroad, nay, in the town
in which Marx lived. Only in those conditions, with the con-
trol in Marx’s own hands, would there be a guarantee that it
would represent his views entirely. But that would require
means which were not at the disposal of Marx and his friends.
Impossible as it was to found an organ of his own, the
opportunity presented itself in 1847 of so influencing a paper
already in existence that it would in effect be as good as his
own. Since the beginning of the year the Deutsche Briisseler
Z eitung had been published weekly in Brussels by Adalbert von
Bornstedt, who had contributed in his time to the Paris
Vorwarts . Bornstedt was very anxious to secure Marx as a
contributor. But Bornstedt was a man with a very doubtful
past and with very doubtful connections. People stated quite
openly, in speech and in writing, that he was in the service of
the political police. The only thing they had any doubt about
was in whose pay he actually was. He was held by some to
be an Austrian spy, by others to be a spy of Prussia. Others
again believed that it was ‘Russian roubles that seemed to
smile towards him.’ There is no doubt that Marx knew of
these incriminating allegations, which were frequently men-
tioned in the letters that passed between him and Heine
during the time of their friendship. Even Freiligrath, whom
in the first months of his Brussels exile Marx saw practically
every day, believed that Bornstedt was a spy who had come to
Brussels for the special purpose of keeping watch on the
‘emigrants’ there.
THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE I2J
At first Marx had no contact with the Deutsche Briisseler
J^eitung, if for no other reason than that politically it was
completely colourless. ‘So far it has no significance whatever/
the Prussian ambassador reported to Berlin on January 20,
1847. ® ut with every number the paper became more opposi-
tional, more revolutionary. The King of Prussia was the special
subject of its attacks, and on April 3 the ambassador reported
that the paper ‘attacked His Majesty’s Government with
revolting scurrility and savagery. 5 Not content with quoting
the paper’s ‘scurrility/ he made representations to the Belgian
police, who should ‘curb’ it. At the moment, however, they
were not inclined to do the Prussian’s bidding. The demarches
of the Prussian ambassador only had the effect of causing the
Belgian newspapers to take up the matter and of supplying the
Deutsche Briisseler Zjeitung with new material. It became ‘even
more scurrilous and violent in its attacks on foreign govern-
ments and princes.’
In these circumstances the suspicion that had previously
rested on Bornstedt necessarily diminished. Marx started
writing for the Deutsche Briisseler Zjeitung in April, 1847. Born-
stedt ‘had declared himself ready to do everything possible for
us.’ Doubtless Marx had come to the conclusion that there
was no foundation for the allegations against him. Suspicion
was hurled about among the German exiles at that time just
as easily as it was among the Poles, among whom every
political opponent, because he was an opponent, was thought
capable of being a spy.
Now that the dossiers of the secret police are available it is
known that there was substance in the denunciations of Born-
stedt. He spied for Austria, for Prussia and perhaps for a few
of the smaller German states as well. His reports, preserved
among the secret state papers in Berlin, contain a wealth of
material about the German exiles. But all his reports date
from the thirties and the beginning of the forties. There is, of
course, no proof that he gave up his nefarious activities with
the cessation of his reports, but on the other hand the possi-
bility that he became a genuine revolutionary is not excluded.
He was an adventurer. He took part in Herwegh’s expedition
in 1848, fought against the troops of Baden, was taken prisoner
and died mentally deranged.
128
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
As soon as Marx started writing for the Deutsche Brusseler
Zjeitung he started trying to persuade others to do the same.
He wrote to Herwegh and complained that the Germans were
always finding new faults with the paper. Instead of taking
advantage of it they were merely ‘wasting an opportunity of
accomplishing something. Their attitude to my manuscripts
is rather like their attitude to the Deutsche Brusseler £eitung, and
at the same time the asses write to me every other day, asking
me why I don’t print anything, and they even try persuading
me that it is better to write in French than not to write at all.
One will have to atone a long time for having been born a
Teuton!’
The advice to write in French annoyed Marx, in view of his
criticism of Proudhon, which had appeared in July, 1847.
In his reply to the invitation to co-operate from Paris in the
activities of the correspondence committees Proudhon had
promised to write a book giving his own solution of the social
problem. He kept his promise and wrote his Systeme des
Contradictions Economiques , ou la Philosophic de la Misere . The
‘solution’ turned out to be nothing but ‘petty-bourgeois re-
formism’ wrapped up in misunderstood Hegelian dialectical
formulas. In his reply, Misere de la Philosophic , written in French
in order to be intelligible to Proudhon’s readers, Marx merci-
lessly cracked the ‘critical whip’ that Proudhon had expected
down on Proudhon’s ‘eternal ideas’ and ‘eternal laws,’ his
philosophical confusion, his ‘moral’ and ‘philosophical’ ex-
planations of economic conditions. Just as Marx had to fight
all his life against pupils of Weitling — most of them did not
know who their teacher was — so also had he to struggle
against Proudhonism, in France particularly but in Germany
as well.
The Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung was a very useful platform for
keeping every possible kind of pseudo-Socialist and pseudo-
radical in check. It very soon occupied a prominent position
in the international democratic movement. The London
Chartist assembly of September, 1847, hailed the Deutsche
Brusseler Z e ^ un Sy the Paris Reforme and the Northern Star as ‘the
three greatest and most democratic organs of Europe.’ That
in spite of all obstacles it was smuggled into Germany in fairly
large numbers appears from numerous complaints in the
THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 129
police reports. It was read by all the German workers in
Brussels.
Marx had already established good relations with them.
After the conversion of the Brussels correspondence com-
mittee into a branch of the Communist League he and his
friends formed the Brussels German Workers’ Educational
Union. Wherever members of the League of the Just and
later of the Communist League went they founded legal
organisations of this kind as soon as ever it became pos-
sible. The Brussels Union was patterned in every way, in
aims, rules and constitution, on the London German Workers’
Union.
Regular meetings were held twice a week. On Wednesdays
there were lectures and the speaker was usually Marx. All
that has survived of his economic lectures is what was later
printed in the Neue Rheinische fitting under the title of Wage-
Labour and Capital. Sundays were devoted to entertainment,
previous to which Wilhelm Wolff always gave ‘a review of the
events of the day, which were invariably masterpieces of
popular description, humorous and at the same time vivid,
duly castigating the individual pettiness and blackguardisms
of rulers and ruled in Germany alike.’ Afterwards there were
recitations — sometimes by Marx’s wife — in addition to singing
and dancing.
Police spies soon got excitedly to work on the paper and
the club. A confidential report to the police authorities at
Frankfurt-on- Main states: ‘This noxious paper must indisput-
ably exert the most corrupting influence upon the uneducated
public at whom it is directed. The alluring theory of the
dividing-up of wealth is held out to factory-workers and day-
labourers as an innate right, and a profound hatred of the
rulers and the rest of the community is inculcated into them.
There would be a gloomy outlook for the Fatherland and for
civilisation if such activities succeeded in undermining religion
and respect for the laws and in any great measure infected the
lowest class of the people by means of the Press and these
clubs. , . . The circumstance that the number of members (of
the Workers’ Union) has increased from thirty-seven to seventy
within a few days is worthy of note.’
The Brussels branch of the Communist League was closely
9
130 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
allied to the Left wing of the Belgian Democrats, not,
of course, officially, but by reason of close personal con-
nections. The editor of the Atelier DSmocratique , a little paper
published in a Brussels suburb, was L. Heilberg, a German
refugee who died young. It was therefore quite natural for
the Brussels branch of the League to take an active part
in the formation of the International Democratic Union in
Brussels.
Several attempts had been made in the thirties and forties
to realise the idea of linking up all the revolutionary organisa-
tions in Europe and setting up a holy alliance of peoples against
the Holy Alliance of kings. French, Germans, Greeks and
other nationalities gathered round the headquarters of the
Carbonari in Switzerland. Mazzini’s Young Europe had national
sections for ‘Young’ Italians, Germans, Poles, French, etc.
Public banquets, which it was difficult for the police to ban,
were a favourite method of bringing representatives of revo-
lutionary movements together. Marx took part in a banquet
of this kind in Paris in the spring of 1844. Nothing is known
about it except that it took place and that French, Germans
and Russians used the occasion to discuss democratic propa-
ganda.
More, however, is known about the celebrations in Weit-
ling’s honour held in London on September 22, 1844. On this
occasion Karl Schapper proposed the formation of a propa-
ganda organisation with a view to uniting the democrats of all
countries. There was unanimous enthusiasm for this proposal,
but a year passed by before it was possible to take steps to carry
it out. On September 22, 1845, more than a thousand Demo-
crats of all nationalities gathered in London to celebrate
the anniversary of the French Revolution. The initiator
of the gathering was G. J. Harney, next to Ernest Jones the
most zealous of the Chartist leaders who had risen above the
prevalent insularity. Harney’s words: ‘We reject the word
“foreigner.” It must no longer exist in our democratic
vocabulary,’ became a reality in the society of Fraternal
Democrats, formed on March 15, 1846. At first it was quite
a loose association, intended to bring foreigners living in
England closer to their similarly-minded English friends. In
the summer of 1847 lt was organised on a more formal basis.
THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE
131
Each nationality was given a general secretariat of its own.
Harney was the English representative, the revolutionary
Michelet, whose real name was Juin d’Allas, represented the
French, and Karl Schapper represented the Germans. Their
motto, ‘All men are brothers,’ was that of the London German
Workers’ Union.
In 1847 ^e Fraternal Democrats were extremely active, and
there was no important event in international politics to which
they did not declare their attitude, either in pamphlets or in
the Press. In the autumn of 1847, they published a manifesto
to all nations in which they outlined a plan for the formation
of a widespread organisation, an ‘International organisation
eligible to people of all nationalities, with international com-
mittees in as many towns as possible.’ There was a particu-
larly lively response to the appeal in Belgium. In July, 1846,
the Brussels correspondence committee had congratulated
Feargus O’Connor, the Chartist, on his victory in the Notting-
ham election. The Northern Star had printed an article sent by
the ‘German Democratic Communists’ and signed by Marx,
Engels and Gigot, and the Fraternal Democrats greeted it as
‘another proof of the advance of fraternity, and the approaching
union of the Democrats of all countries in the great struggle for
political and social equality.’
On September 27, 1847, the Association Democratique , ay ant
pour but V union et la f rater nite de tons les peuples , was founded in
Brussels. Singularly enough, it was founded originally as a
counter-stroke to the local branch of the Communist League
and was intended to resist the growing influence of Marx
among the German refugees and the Belgian radicals. Born-
stedt, who was consumed by ambition but was prevented by
Marx from taking a direct part in political activity himself,
wanted in all circumstances to play a political role. In Marx’s
absence from Brussels he took advantage of the opportunity to
summon a conference of Democrats of various nations, at which
it was decided to form a new organisation.
Marx’s friends, and the nimble Engels in particular, had no
difficulty in side-tracking Bornstedt, and Engels occupied the
position of vice-president himself until Marx should return.
In the middle of November Marx was formally elected as
the German representative. The veteran General Antoine-
132 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Francois Mellinet, national hero of 1830, was elected honorary
president. The Belgian representative was Lucien-Leopold
Jottrand, a lawyer and editor of the Brussels Dibat Social , the
French representative was Jacques Imbert, a Blanquist with
a renowned revolutionary past, and the Polish representative
was the famous historian, Joachim Lelevel.
In the months that followed Marx worked for the Association
Dcmocratique with the greatest energy. At a public meeting
in Brussels he spoke on the question of Free Trade, and the
association published his speech as a pamphlet. He travelled
to Ghent, where a meeting of more than three thousand people,
predominantly workers, decided to form a branch association.
There seemed excellent foundation for the hope that the
organisation might grow into a strong, well-organised Demo-
cratic party.
The Communist League, the Workers 5 Union, the Associa-
tion Dcmocratique, writing for the Brussels newspaper, an
extensive correspondence with Germany, England and France,
to say nothing of his literary labours, made ample claims on
Marx’s energy. But nothing would be more mistaken than to
imagine the young Marx — at the outbreak of the revolution of
1848 he was barely thirty years old — as a gloomy ascetic and
fanatic.
The letters of Marx and Engels between 1844 and 1847 are
an excellent biographical source for the life of the latter. But
only one letter of Marx’s has come down to us from that time.
All the same there are a few documents that throw light on
Marx’s personal life in Brussels.
His brother-in-law, Edgar von Westphalen, stayed in
Brussels until the late autumn of 1847. Jenny Marx was very
fond of him. ‘My one, beloved brother,’ she called him in a
letter to Frau Liebknecht. ‘The ideal of my childhood and
youth, my dear and only friend.’ He was a Communist, but
apparently not a very active one. He was an enemy of
philistinism rather than of bourgeois society, a completely un-
stable and irresolute person, but good-hearted and a cheerful
companion. Marx was very fond of him. Weydemeyer wrote
to his fiancCe in February, 1846:
THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE I33
‘If I tell you what kind of life we have been leading here,
you will certainly be surprised at the Communists. To
crown the folly, Marx, Weitling, Marx’s brother-in-law and
I sat up the whole night playing. Weitling got tired first.
Marx and I slept a few hours on a sofa and idled away the
whole of the next day in the company of his wife and his
brother-in-law in the most priceless manner. We went to a
tavern early in the morning, then we went by train to Ville-
worde, which is a little place near by, where we had lunch
and then returned in the most cheerful mood by the last
train. 5
Not nearly so many Germans found their way to Brussels
as to Paris. But no one who had even the most distant sym-
pathy with Communism failed to visit Marx. Stephan Born
visited ‘the spiritual centre of Communism 5 at the end of
October. This young printer had become a friend of Engels
in Paris, turned Communist and made an able defence of
Communism against the Republican Karl Heinzen, the
‘caricature of a German Jacobin 5 who was later known in
America as the ‘prince-killer. 5 In 1848 Born was one of the
leaders of the Berlin workers 5 movement, but when he wrote
his reminiscences in his old age at Bile he was a tedious social-
reformist university professor. But he always retained a shy
veneration for Marx. ‘I found him, 5 he wrote, writing in
retrospect of the autumn of 1847, an extremely modest, one
might almost say poorly furnished, little house in a suburb of
Brussels. He received me in a friendly way, asked about the
success of my propaganda journey, and paid me a compliment,
with which his wife associated herself, about my pamphlet
against Heinzen. She bade me a very friendly welcome.
Throughout her life she took the most intense interest in every-
thing that concerned and occupied her husband, and therefore
she could not fail to be interested in me, as I was considered one
of his hopeful young men. . . . Marx loved his wife and she
shared his passion. I have never known such a happy marriage,
in which joy and suffering — the latter in the richest measure —
and all pain were overcome in such a spirit of mutual devotion.
I have seldom known a woman, so harmoniously formed alike
in outward appearance and heart and mind, make such a pre-
possessing impression at the first meeting. Frau Marx was
134 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
fair. Her children, who were still small, were dark-haired and
dark-eyed like their father. 95
Marx’s second daughter, Laura, was born in September,
1845, and his son Edgar, in December, 1846. The irregular
income he earned by writing did not suffice to keep the growing
family, and Marx was forced to borrow. In February, 1848,
his material position improved, although only for a short time.
For the six thousand francs his mother, after long negotiations,
at last paid him out of his father’s estate, were applied to
political ends, to which all personal needs had to take second
place.
The second Communist Congress was fixed for the autumn
of 1847, an d by then the League’s profession of faith’ had to be
ready. Schapper attempted a first draft, Moses Hess attempted
another, but the Paris branch of the League rejected both.
Then Engels applied himself to the task. The form he chose
for it was the one that was conventional at the time for declara-
tions of the kind by Communist and other Left wing groups.
It was drawn up in the form of questions and answers, like the
catechism. Engels’s catechism was written in straightforward,
easily intelligible language and stated the fundamental ideas of
scientific Socialism tersely and with transparent clarity. But
Engels was not satisfied with it. In his opinion it was wretch-
edly written, and he thought it would be better to abandon
the form of the catechism altogether, as it was necessary
for the ‘thing’ to contain a certain number of descriptions
of events. He suggested to Marx the title of ‘Communist
Manifesto.’
The Paris branch appointed Engels their delegate to the
Congress, and this time the Brussels branch sent Marx. The
two friends met at Ostend, discussed the draft and agreed that
the first statement of aims of the Communist League to which
they now belonged and of which they had become the leaders
must not be one of the conventional popular pamphlets,
however good it might be of its kind.
Marx, in addition to being the representative of the Brussels
Communists, had a mandate to represent the Association
D^mocratique at the conference of the Fraternal Democrats
THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE I35
on November 29. The Fraternal Democrats had organised
some celebrations in memory of the Polish revolt of 1830. The
celebrations were typical of those held in those years of demon-
strations of international solidarity in all the lands of Western
Europe. The Communist Congress was to meet next day in
the same hall, that of the London German Workers’ Union,
and the Communist delegates took part in the celebrations in
honour of the Polish revolutionaries. Marx spoke side by side
with English, French, German, Belgian and Polish speakers.
He spoke of the imminent revolution. ‘The old Poland is lost, 5
he said, ‘and we should be the last to wish its restoration. But
it is not only old Poland that is lost, but old Germany, old
France, old England, the whole of our antiquated society.
But the loss of our antiquated society is no loss for those who
have nothing to lose in it, and the great majority in all the
countries of the present day are in that position. They have
far more to win by the downfall of our antiquated society,
which will bring in its train the formation of a new
society, no longer resting on class-conflicts. 5 Marx announced
that the Association Democratique proposed to summon an
international Democratic congress for the following year.
It coincided with a similar proposal by the Fraternal Demo-
crats. It was decided to hold the congress in Brussels on
October 25, 1848. It was not held, for events were too fast
for it.
Next day the deliberations of the Communists began. They
lasted for ten days, a time of strenuous activity for Marx and
Engels. True, the Londoners had been won over to Marx, but
much human effort and patient instruction and wary indul-
gence for old sensibilities were required before the last traces
of mistrust of the ‘intellectuals 5 were extinguished. The newly
organised League — the statutes were definitely fixed — was
without a trace of the conspiratorial character which had been
such an essential element in the League of the Just. That it
must remain a secret society was obvious. Even outside
Germany, in free England, the Communists could not well
have their organisation registered with the police. But within
these limits, which were set by external necessity and were not
self-imposed as they were in the case of the League of the Just
or the French secret societies, because the Communist League
136 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
had no secret teaching for initiates only and did not plot, and
because ‘ Communists scorned to keep their views and inten-
tions secret,’ within these limits it was an association for
propaganda on a democratic basis.
Whether Engels laid his catechism before the Congress or
not is not known. The delegates decided to entrust Marx and
Engels with the drafting of their programme. The head-
quarters of the League remained in London, and Schapper,
Heinrich Bauer and Moll remained its leaders. They were
unanimous that the theoretical guidance of the League must
be left to Marx.
Marx worked on the Communist Manifesto from the middle
of December till the end of January. That was too slow for
the German Communists in London. On January 24 they
admonished him to hasten. They would take disciplinary
measures against Citizen Marx, they wrote rather harshly, if
the manuscript were not in their hands by February 1. But
the ultimatum was superfluous, because Marx sent the manu-
script to London before the prescribed day.
The Communist Manifesto was the common work of Marx
and Engels. It is impossible to distinguish their respective
contributions. But, as Engels frequently repeated, the funda-
mental ideas, the groundwork, belong to Marx alone. Marx
gave it its form too. It is Marx’s tremendous power that flows
from every word, it is his fire with which the most brilliant
pamphlet in world literature illuminates the times, to-day just
as on the day on which it was completed.
The Manifesto gave an unerring leader to the proletariat in
its struggle; not unerring in the narrow sense a dogmatist might
attribute to the word, not unerring in the sense that every
word is valid for the present day. It was written a few weeks
before the outbreak of the European revolution of 1848. It
proposed revolutionary measures which a quarter of a century
later Marx and Engels called out-of-date becauge of the
development of economic, social and political conditions.
Unerring rather because, surveying the whole course of
historical development, it enabled the workers concretely to
understand their historical situation. The tremendous revo-
lutionary pathos of the Manifesto does not dazzle but sharpens
the view for the direct task ahead. Because it saw into the most
THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE I37
distant future, it saw into the most immediate present. It was
the programme for the historical epoch of the struggle for the
proletarian revolution and at the same time the programme for
the next day’s sober, disillusioned fight.
When the last sheets of the Communist Manifesto left
the printing press Marx was in the midst of revolutionary
Paris.
CHAPTER XII
THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPEST
The first sign of revolution came from Switzerland in Novem-
ber, 1847.
Im Hochland fiel der erste Schuss,
Im Hochland wider die Pfaffen . 1
The reactionary cantons which formed the Roman Catholic
League rose against the decision of the Federal Council to
expel the Jesuits. The governments of Russia, Austria, Prussia
and France, always ready to step in on the side of reaction,
which was the very principle of their existence, took the part
of the Catholic cantons and threatened military intervention.
A local Swiss conflict flared up into a question of European
importance. Oxenbein, leader of the Swiss radicals, threatened
that if Austria dared to intervene he would send an army of
twenty thousand men into Lombardy and proclaim an Italian
republic. The Austrian troops gathered at the frontier but
did not move and three weeks later the Catholic cantons were
beaten. The arrival in London of the news of the fall of
Lucerne, their capital, coincided with the opening of the
Communist Congress.
From the Alps the revolutionary avalanche poured down
into the Italian plain. In the face of the Swiss threat Austria
beat a pitiful retreat. The prestige of the alien ruler was
shaken. There were stormy demonstrations in Lombardy, and
in some places the demonstrations developed into open fighting.
In January insurrection broke out in the south, in Sicily.
Drauf ging der Tanz in Welschland los
Die Scyllen und Charybden,
Vesuv und Aetna brachen los,
Ausbruch auf Ausbruch, Stoss auf Stoss. . . . 2
1 The first shot was fired in the high country
Against the priests.
2 The dance started in the South; Scylla and Gharybdis,
Vesuvius and Etna burst forth, outbreak on outbreak,
blow on blow.
138
THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPEST I39
The revolutionaries defeated the troops of the Bourbon
Ferdinand of Naples in a five-day street-battle. Insurrection
broke out in one Italian state after another. Constitutions
were declared in Naples, Turin and Florence. King Ferdinand
barely escaped trial by a people’s court.
The industrial crisis which had made Europe ripe for revolu-
tion was particularly severe in Belgium, where economic
development was relatively high. In the winter of 1847-8
unemployment in the textile areas rose from week to week, and
in the workers’ quarters, which were accustomed to privation,
famine stalked abroad. Not a single day passed by, writes the
historian of the Belgian workers’ movement, without a starving
worker breaking a shop-window for the sake of appeasing his
hunger in prison.
The 1847 elections had brought the Liberals into power.
They demonstrated their incapacity to check the crisis, and the
agitation of the radical Democrats fell on fertile soil. The
Association Democratique was the leading spirit. Branch
associations sprang up one after another in Ghent, Li^ge,
Namur and elsewhere. Members streamed in in masses. They
came from the working classes, from the hard-pressed petty-
bourgeoisie and from intellectual circles too. Political tension
grew as the economic crisis became more acute.
Events abroad were followed in Belgium with the greatest
interest. ‘The executioner is waiting,’ Engels exclaimed with
joy when in January, 1848, he summed up the progress of the
movement during the past year for the Deutsche Briisseler
Zeitung. The revolutionary wave swept over all frontiers, no
firm-built dam was strong enough to hold it. Engels actually
anticipated by a century the collapse of the ‘chequered’
Austrian Empire, ‘botched together of bits stolen here and
inherited there.’ Poland seemed to be striking a fatal blow at
Europe’s other gendarme, Nicholas I of Russia. Poland, as
has already been observed, was the country to which the
revolutionaries of all countries kept their gaze constantly
riveted during the three decades of reaction. The rising of
Poland must mean the rising of all Europe, the liberation of
Poland would be at once a symbol and a signal for all the
oppressed. In the winter of 1847-8 three great democratic
demonstrations on behalf of Poland took place in Brussels. On
140 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
February 14 Belgians, Poles and Germans demonstrated in
honour of the heroes of the 1 830 revolution and the martyrs of
the rising of the Russian Dekabrists. A week later, on February
22, Marx spoke at a meeting in memory of the Cracow rising
of 1846. Marx extolled the Polish revolution and lauded the
rising at Cracow for the glorious example it set Europe, ‘ en
identifiant la cause de la nationalite d la cause de la democratic et d
V ajjranchissement de la classe opprimee ’ 1 The meeting closed with
a pathetic scene. Old Lelevel, the veteran of the Polish
revolution, embraced Marx and kissed him.
The refugees, forced to restrain themselves for so many years,
cast themselves the more passionately into political activity
now. There was no meeting in which they did not participate.
This applied in particular to the German exiles, who threw
themselves enthusiastically into the Belgian movement, without
of course, forgetting their more particular German duties.
There were innumerable contacts with the adjacent territories
of Prussia, particularly with the Rhineland. After Marx and
his comrades joined the Communist League they saw to it that
every Communist with whom they were in contact founded a
branch of the League. Illegal literature published abroad was
smuggled into Germany in great quantities, and the more
important articles from the Deutsche Briisseler Zjeitmg were
reprinted as fly-sheets and fairly widely distributed.
The German Communists in Belgium prepared to hurry to
Germany at the first sign. Wilhelm Wolff was arrested by the
Brussels police in the middle of February, 1848, and stated
openly that he and his friends were directing all their attention
to Germany, where they were carrying out intense propa-
ganda. ‘Cologne and Aix-la-Chapelle,’ he is quoted as
saying in a police report, ‘were the places designated for
the risings.’
Hitherto the Belgian police and the Belgian Conservatives
had not paid any particular attention to the German Com-
munists. The Prussian ambassador never kept them out of his
sight, and from time to time called the attention of the Belgian
authorities to their ‘criminal activities,’ but without result.
This state of affairs altered when the situation in the country
1 In identifying the cause of nationality with that of democracy and the emanci-
pation of tile oppressed class.
THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPEST 141
became acute and the Germans became active. Several
newspapers started attacking the German exiles, and the Prussian
ambassador probably had a hand in the campaign. On
January 20 he was able to inform his Government that the
Belgian police now considered it necessary to keep a watch on
the agitation being carried out and that they intended to take
definite steps against foreigners, and against the Germans in
particular. There is no doubt that the ambassador did all he
could to encourage police action. Meanwhile tension grew
from day to day. But everybody knew that the revolution
could only conquer after it had conquered in Paris. Everybody
waited for the crowing of the Gallic cock.
Unrest was rife in France. Suffrage reforms were demanded
and, in accordance with the custom of the time, a campaign of
banquets was organised. But nothing pointed to an immediate
revolutionary outbreak. Louis Philippe, an old cynic who had
experienced many revolutions, attempted to pacify his minis-
ters. ‘The Parisians won’t start a revolution in winter,’ he said.
‘They storm things in hot weather. They stormed the Bastille
in July, the Bourbon throne in June. But in January or
February, no.’ The stout, phlegmatic Louis Philippe forgot
that salvoes fired into a crowd can cause a July temperature in
February. On February 23 the military fired at a peaceful
demonstration. Next morning Paris was filled with barricades.
The people’s cry was not for electoral reform but a republic.
On the evening of the 24th the Palais Royal was in the hands
of the insurrectionists. The king fled and a bonfire was made
of the throne. The same evening a Provisional Government
was formed and a republic proclaimed.
Events in Paris were known in Brussels, but even the greatest
optimists had not expected things to develop so rapidly and so
successfully. After the outbreak of the insurrection connection
between Paris and Brussels was interrupted.
‘On the evening of February 24, 1848,’ writes Stephan Born,
‘half a dozen German youths were standing on the Paris
platform at Brussels station. They were practically alone.
Since morning there had been no train from the French capital
and no news about the unrest which had broken out. The
honest inhabitants of the Belgian capital were a somewhat
slow-blooded race and had to be warmed up before they got
142 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
going. Curiosity about what might have happened in Paris
apparently did not trouble them. We few Germans were, as
I said, almost alone on the platform, and we were foreigners.
But no, there were two other people, a lady and a gentleman,
standing silently and anxiously in a corner. They too were
waiting for the train, which, even if it did not come all the
way from Paris, would at least be coming from the French
frontier. Occasionally one or other of them would cast a
gloomy look at us as we stood there chattering happily, ex-
pressing our conjectures and hopes concerning the news the
arrival of which could not be delayed much longer now.
They guessed our thoughts and advanced a few paces towards
us, but suddenly a protracted whistle announced the approach
of the long-awaited train. Another moment and it was in
the station. Before it came to a standstill, the guard jumped
down and shouted at the top of his voice: “The Red Flag is
flying on the tower of Valenciennes and a Republic has been
proclaimed . 55
c “Long live the Republic ! 55 we shouted as with one voice.
But the lady and gentleman who had been waiting for news
turned pale and beat a hurried retreat. A station official told
us that they were the French ambassador, General Rumigny,
and his wife . 5
The victory of the Paris revolution disconcerted and dis-
mayed the Belgian Government, or at any rate so it appeared
on the surface. Rogier, the Minister for Foreign Affairs,
opened negotiations with his friend, Considerant, the Fourierist,
who recommended a revolution from above. The Govern-
ment, which was in the hands of the Liberals, should proclaim
a republic itself. The king gave the Republicans the hint
that he would not oppose the people’s will and was ready to
abdicate if the Belgians really wanted a Republic. All he
wished was that everything should happen in an orderly
manner and without bloodshed, and besides he hoped for a
respectable pension.
Everything seemed to be developing excellently, but the
whole thing was only a manoeuvre. In the meantime the
Government called up the reserves and the soldiers on furlough
and marched the regiments to Brussels. So far from trying to
stop the spreading of rumours to the effect that they were
THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPEST I43
prepared to accede of their own accord to the most extreme
demands, they rather encouraged them in order to diminish
the tension and pacify the determined few.
The leadership of the movement was provided by the
Association Democratique practically alone. On February 27
it summoned a mass meeting, which decided to meet again on
the following day, this time outside the Town Hall, to demand
the calling up of workers and artisans to supplement the
National Guard and provide the necessary pressure. An appeal
to arms was made at the meeting, in order not to be defenceless
in case of a police attack. Late that night there were a number
of minor demonstrations, which were broken up by the police
and gave them the desired opportunity to forbid the meeting
on the following day. The Government, now having a
sufficiency of military power on which to rely, suddenly
adopted an entirely different tone. When the Democratic
deputies said in the Chamber that the triumphal march of
the Revolution would advance from Paris and conquer the
whole world, the Government spokesman replied that it was
scarcely necessary for freedom to make a world tour of that
kind before it came to Belgium.
The German exiles were in the forefront of the revolutionary
movement. Marx helped to draft the address of greeting the
Association Democratique sent the Provisional Government
in France. The address spoke of the great tasks that still lay
ahead of the revolution. German emigres took part in the
demonstration of the night of February 28. Wilhelm Wolff
was arrested and a knife was found on him. According to
the police Marx gave five thousand of the six thousand francs
he had just received to buy weapons for the workers of Brussels.
The police had their opportunity of dealing with the exiles
at last. They worked in close touch with the Prussian ambassa-
dor, who had in his possession on February 29, only a day or
two after it was drawn up, a list of those who were to be
expelled. Marx’s name was at the top of the list.
Marx had no intention of staying in Belgium in any case.
The revolutionary centre of Europe was Paris, where his old
acquaintance, Flocon, now a member of the Provisional
Government, summoned him. He invited the ‘dear and brave
[ cher et vaillanty Marx to return to the land from which tyranny
144 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
had banished him. ‘ La tyrannie vous a banni , la libre France
vous ouvre les portes , d vous et a tous ceux qui luttent pour la sainte
cause de la fraternite des peuples ' 1
The letter was sent from Paris on the first of March. Marx
received it on the second or the third and its arrival practically
coincided with a police order giving him twenty-four hours to
leave Brussels. The expulsion order was handed to Marx at
five o’clock on March 3. He had a few hours in which to settle
a mass of personal and political affairs.
Almost as soon as the news of the successful Paris rising
reached London Schapper, Heinrich Bauer and others at the
headquarters of the Communist League decided to hurry to
Paris. The London branch of the League resolved to transfer
the powers vested in it to the Brussels branch. The Brussels
branch was Marx, but Marx was expelled from Brussels. On
the evening of March 3 the five representatives of the branch
gathered in Marx’s room in the hotel in which he was living.
The meeting dissolved the newly appointed League central
office, invested Marx personally with full powers and entrusted
him with the task of constituting a new central office in Paris.
Before they had time to leave the premises, they were raided
by the police. They failed to capture Marx’s friends, who
managed to slip away in the general confusion. But the
League papers and documents fell into their hands, among
them the minutes of the meeting which had just taken place.
Thus the names of the chief officials of the League fell into
their possession. As a sign and token of their new-born
friendship, a copy of the minutes and other documents found
in Marx’s room was sent to the Prussian ambassador.
Marx described the disgraceful behaviour of the police in
a letter to the Reforme :
‘Aprfo avoir re$u> le 3 mars, d cinq heures du soir , Vordre de quitter
le royaume beige dans le delai de vingt-quatre heures , fetais occupe
encore , dans la nuit du mime jour , de faire mes preparatifs de voyage ,
lorsqu'un commissaire de police , accompagni de dix gardes municipaux ,
pinitra dans mon domicile, fouilla toute la maison , et finit par rrCarriter ,
sous pretexte queje n'avais pas de papier s. Sans parler des papier s tres
reguliers que M. Duchatel m'avait remis en m’expulsant de la France ,
1 Tyranny has banished you; free France flings wide her portals for you, and
all who struggle in the sacred cause of the brotherhood of the peoples.
THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPEST I45
je tenais en mains le passeport <T expulsion que la Belgique m? avait
delivri ily avait quelques heures settlement.
'Je ne vous aurais pas parli ', monsieur, de mon arrestation et des
brutalites que fai souffertes, sHl ne s'y rattachait une circonstance
qu 9 on aura peine d comprendre , mime en Autriche.
' Immediatement aprfo mon arrestation , ma femme se fait conduire
chez M. Jottrand, president de V association dSmocratique de Belgique,
pour V engager d prendre les mesures necessaires. En rentrant chez
elle, elle trouve d la porte un sergent de ville qui lui dit, avec une
politesse exquise, que, si elle voulait parler d M. Marx, elle n’aurait
qud le suivre. Ma femme accepte Voffre avec empressement. On la
conduit au bureau de la police, et le commissaire lui declare d'abord que
M. Marx ri*y etait pas; puis il lui demande brutalement qui elle etait,
ce qu'ellc allait faire chez M. Jottrand, et si elle avait ses papiers sur
elle . Un democrate beige, M . Gigot, qui avait suivi ma femme au
bureau de la police avec la garde municipal, se revoltant des questions
d la fois absurdes et insolentes du commissaire, est reduit au silence par
des gardes qui s'emparent de lui et le jettent en prison . Sous le pretexte
de vagabondage, ma femme est amenee d la prison de V Hotel-de-Ville,
et enfermee avec des femmes perdues, dans une salle obscure . A onze
heures du matin , elle est conduite en plein jour , sous toute une escorte
de gendarmerie, au cabinet dujuge d’ instruction. Pendant deux heures,
elle est mise au secret , malgre les plus vines reclamations qui arrivent
de toutes parts. Elle reste Id exposie d toute la rigeur de la saison et
aux propos les plus indignes des gendarmes.
‘ Elle par ait enfin devant le juge d* instruction, qui est tout itonne
que la police, dans sa sollicitude, vl a pas arreti egalement les enfants
de bas-age. U interrogatoire ne pouvait itre que factice, et tout le crime
de ma femme consiste en ce que, bien qiC appartenant d V aristocratie
prussienne, elle partage les sentiments democratiques de son mari.
‘ Je n'entre pas dans tous les details de cette revoltante affaire. Je
dirai seulement que, lorsque nous etions relaches, les vingt-quatre heures
etaient justement expirees, et qu'il nous fallait partir sans pouvoir
seulement emporter les effets les plus indispensables . 91
1 After receiving on March 3 at five o’clock in the afternoon an order to leave
Belgium within twenty-four hours, on the evening of the same day, when I was
still busy with preparations for my journey, a commissary of police, accompanied
by ten municipal guards, entered my apartments, searched the whole house and
ended by arresting me on the pretext that I had no papers. Apart from the highly
regular papers which M. Duchatel supplied me with on expelling me from France,
I had in my possession the expulsion passport which Belgium had supplied me
with but a few hours previously.
I should not have spoken of my arrest and of the brutalities to which I was
10
I46 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
The Belgian Liberal Press made a vigorous protest against
the ignominy with which their country was covering itself.
Engels mobilised the Chartist Press in England. The deputy
Bricourt demanded an interpellation in the Belgian Chamber.
The commissary of police who had arrested Marx and his wife
was dismissed. But by that time Marx was no longer on
Belgian soil.
He was taken to the frontier under police escort. It was a
journey with many obstacles. The trains and the stations were
packed to suffocation with soldiers on their way to the south.
The air positively hummed with rumours. It was said that
the French and Belgian legions which had been formed on
French soil intended to found a Belgian republic at the point
of the bayonet. They would be suitably received!
In France the victory of the Republic was still being cele-
brated. The stations were beflagged, the red flag and the
tricolour flew side by side and enthusiasm was still running
high. The railway lines had been torn up at Valenciennes
and a half-hour omnibus ride was imposed on the travellers
before they could resume their train journey. Here, as on
the stretch between Pontoise and St. Denis, coachmen and
subjected were it not for one circumstance which would be difficult to understand,
even in Austria.
Immediately after my arrest my wife called on M. Jottrand, president of the
Democratic Association of Belgium, to ask him to take the necessary steps. On
her return she found a policeman at the door who told her, with exquisite polite-
ness, that if she wished to talk to M. Marx she had only to follow him. My wife
eagerly accepted the offer. She was conducted to the police-station, where the
commissary started by telling her that M. Marx was not there; he then rudely
asked who she was, what she wanted with M. Jottrand and whether she had her
papers with her. M. Gigot, a Belgian Democrat who accompanied my wife and
the policeman to the police-station, indignant at the commissary’s absurd and
insolent questions, was silenced by the guards, who seized him and threw him
into prison. My wife was taken to the Hotel-de-Ville prison on the pretext of
vagabondage and locked up in a dark room in the company of a number of
prostitutes. At eleven o’clock next morning she was taken by an escort of gen-
darmes, in broad daylight, to the office of the examining magistrate. She was kept
in a cell for two hours, in spite of violent protests which arrived from every quarter,
and exposed to all the rigours of the season and to the basest insults by the
gendarmes.
Eventually she appeared before the examining magistrate, who was quite
astonished at the police in their solicitude not having likewise arrested my young
children. Under these circumstances the interrogation amounted to a complete
farce, and my wife’s only crime consists in sharing her husband’s opinions, though
she is of Prussian aristocratic origin.
I shall not enter into all the details of this revolting business, but merely add
that when we were released the twenty-four hours’ grace had just expired and we
were compelled to leave the country without even being able to take with us even
the most indispensable personal effects.
THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPEST 147
innkeepers had taken advantage of the first days of confusion
to avenge themselves on their netv competitor, the railway.
They had torn up rails, burned down stations, smashed engines
and coaches. In spite of all these hindrances Marx reached
Paris on March 4.
Paris still bore fresh marks of the fighting at the barricades.
Fanny Lewald, the German writer, who arrived in Paris a few
days after Marx, described the scene that confronted the new-
comer. The paving stones at the street corners were lying
loosely instead of being cemented down. Here and there
smashed bread carts and overturned omnibuses indicated the
scenes of former barricades. An iron railing outside a church
had been completely torn up, except for a few feet which
showed where an iron railing had been. At the Palais Royal,
or Palais National, as it was now called in big letters, all the
windows, many window-frames and much scaffolding were
broken; the Chateau d’Eau, the guard-house opposite the
Palais Royal, in which the guards had been burned to death,
lay in smoke-black ruins; other guard-houses in the neighbour-
hood of the Seine had been razed to the ground, and National
Guards kept guard, sitting in the nearest taverns which
served them as guard-room. The trees on the Boulevards had
been cut down and the water-pipes and pillars pulled down.
Dirty white curtains fluttered from the paneless windows of
the Tuileries.
The town was still at the height of its brief republican
enthusiasm. ‘The workers, 5 in the words of Engels, ‘ate bread
and potatoes in the day-time and spent the evening planting
“trees of freedom 55 on the boulevards, while enthusiasts ran
wild and sang the Marseillaise and the bourgeoisie hid in
their houses all day long, trying to mollify the fury of the
people by exhibiting coloured lanterns. 5 The old song of the
Gironde was sung:
Mourir pour la patrie
C’est le sort le plus beau
Le plus digne d'envie . 1
The tricolour flew over the Palais Royal and the Tuileries,
where Marx’s old friend, Imbert, was now installed as governor.
1 To die for one’s country is the most beautiful and enviable fate.
148 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Here and there the red flag of the proletarian revolution was
to be seen.
Revolutionary and Socialist clubs sprang up like mushrooms.
Newspapers, pamphlets and fly-sheets appeared every day.
Paris seethed with political life. Boundless possibilities, intoxi-
cating perspectives suddenly opened up before the exiles’ eyes.
It never entered their heads for a moment that the revolution
might stop at the borders of France. The revolutionary flame
that had been kindled in Paris would leap the frontiers and
set Germany, Austria, Poland, the whole of Europe alight.
Since the great French Revolution it had appeared self-
evident that democracies and autocratic monarchies could not
live peacefully side by side. If democracy were victorious it
must necessarily come into collision with neighbouring states
which were still in the hands of absolutism. The revolutionary
war was inevitable if the revolution were not to miscarry again.
During the months that followed the events of February the
question of the revolutionary war was one of the most important
subjects of party controversy. The Blanquists, true to the
tradition of the Great Revolution, which with them was only
too often an obstinate obsession, kept agitating for a revolu-
tionary war with all the passion which was their best inheri-
tance. They urged it not only on the ground that it was the
only thing that could save the new France, but also because
they believed that it was only by and through a war that the
revolution in France could really be fulfilled.
The Provisional Government, and Lamartine, the Minister
for Foreign Affairs, wanted peace. From the very first he
assured all the governments of Europe that France was willing
to have peaceful relations with all states, whatever their form
of government might be.
But the Belgian, Italian and Polish exiles were working for
war and feverishly preparing for it. Each group formed its
own legion to take its place in the great army which should
march against the despots, vanguard of the army of revolu-
tionary France in the last war of all, from which a brotherly
alliance of free peoples should arise. The Germans took
enthusiastically to this idea.
Before Marx’s arrival in Paris a huge meeting of German
exiles and artisans resolved to form a German legion. The
THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPEST I49
resolution had been proposed by Bornstedt, and Herwegh
was elected chairman of the committee. Appeals were already
plastered on the walls of Paris:
‘ Appel au Citoyens Frangais.
‘ Des Armes!
‘ Pour les Allemands marchant au secours de leur frhes qui com -
battent en ce moment pour la liberty qui se font igorger pour leur droits ,
et qv? on veut tromper de nouveau.
‘Les dimocrates allemands de Paris se sont for mis en Ugion pour
aller proclamer ensemble la Ripublique allemande.
‘ II leur faut des armes , des munitions , de 1’ argent, des objets
d'habillement. Pritez-leur votre assistance ; vos dons seront regus avec
gratitude . Ils serviront d delivrer V Allemagne et en mime temps la
Pologne.
6 Dimocrates allemands et polonais marcheront ensemble d la conquite
de la liberti.
‘ Vive la France! Vive la Pologne! Vive V Allemagne unie et
ripublicaine! Vive la fraterniti des peuplesP 1
The first detachments of German legionaries had already
started drilling on the Champ de Mars. They even had their
anthem ready: ‘We march to Germany in masses.’
The plan was to invade Germany and raise an insurrection
in the Odenwald, where the people were already stirred up
and memories of the great German Peasant War still survived.
The whole of Germany, starting with the Odenwald, was to
be roused to revolt. For some, however, this plan was not
nearly ambitious enough. They actually visualised an alliance
with the Poles, who planned a rising in Posen and another in
Galicia, to be followed by an expedition against Russia.
1 Appeal to the Citizens of France
Arms!
Arms for the Germans marching to the help of their brethren now fighting for
liberty, offering their lives for their rights, whom their enemies are trying to
deceive once more!
The German Democrats of Paris have formed a legion to march and proclaim
the German Republic.
They need arms, ammunition, money, clothing. Help them. Your gifts will
be gratefully received. They will help to deliver Germany, and Poland as well.
German and Polish Democrats will march together to the conquest of liberty.
Long live France! Long live Poland! Long live united Republican Germany!
Long live the brotherhood of the peoples!
I50 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Everything seemed possible. It was sufficient for the first
revolutionary trumpets to blow for the walls of the fortress of
Peter and Paul, the citadel of European reaction, to fall of
themselves. The Polish Democrats, who at that time were
everywhere the heroes of the day, had already started squab-
bling with the Russian Democrats about the frontiers of free
and independent Poland. Their revolutionary ardour seemed
equal to the most impossible tasks. c Oh, just for one day,
dare it!’ was the verse with which Herwegh spurred on the
half-hearted. Only one thing was necessary: determination
and again determination.
One of the few not carried away by the enthusiasm and the
tumult was Marx. That France did not want war was plain
enough to anyone who did not take the wish for the reality.
A Blanquist Government would make war, but to bring the
Blanquists into power would require another revolution. If
Lamartine supported and encouraged the legions it was not
on revolutionary grounds but for very much more sober and
mundane reasons. The Provisional Government wanted to
be rid of the foreign workers, who had been a disturbing element
from of old. They were actually willing to subsidise their
journey to the frontier. The legion, which consisted of at most
two thousand men, had no prospects whatever if it fought alone.
It could at best hope for an initial military success. To
the attacked absolutist powers an inroad by the legion could
only be welcome; for it would rouse national and patriotic
feeling in the invaded country and willy-nilly strengthen the
government.
Marx was from the first bitterly opposed to futile, nay
harmful, playing at revolution. He counselled the workers not
to rush headlong to destruction with the legion but to await
developments in Germany, which were bound to lead to revolu-
tion in a very short time. Their place was Paris, not the
Odenwald. Sebastian Seiler, then a member of the Communist
League and an acquaintance of Marx, later wrote:
‘The Socialists and Communists were bitterly opposed to
attempting to establish a German republic by armed inter-
vention from without. They held public meetings in the Rue
St. Denis, which some of the later insurgents attended. Marx
made a long speech at one of these meetings, and said that
THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPEST 151
the February revolution was only to be regarded as the super-
ficial beginning of the European movement. In a short time
open fighting would break out in Paris between the proletariat
and the bourgeoisie (as it actually did in June). On its result
the victory or defeat of revolutionary Europe would depend.
He therefore insisted that the German workers remain in Paris
and prepare in advance to take part in the armed struggle. 5
This was swimming against the stream. The majority of
the revolutionary and democratic German exiles were opposed
to Marx. They called him coward and traitor and hurled
the great, fine-sounding phrases of the French Revolution at
his head. In spite of his outstanding authority in the Com-
munist League, he was opposed by some of its members. Marx
did not retreat a step. The interests of the revolution and of
the working-class were at stake.
At the beginning of March the Fraternal Democrats had
sent a workers’ deputation to Paris with an address to the
Provisional Government. M’Grath represented the Chartist
national executive committee, Jones the London section of
the Party, Harney the Fraternal Democrats, and Schapper and
Moll the London German Workers’ Union. They were given
a friendly reception by Garnier-Pagfes and Ledru-Rollin. The
London and Brussels branches of the Communist League,
assembled now in Paris, were able to constitute the new
central office in all due form. Marx was elected president,
Schapper secretary, and the members were Engels, Moll,
Bauer, Wilhelm Wolff' and Wallau. Marx was now able on
the League’s behalf to break with the organisations which
acknowledged Herwegh and his legion. Borns tedt, who had
been elected to the League in Brussels, was expelled. The
decision and the reasons for it were published and some
newspapers in Germany actually reprinted the news, including
the Trierer £eitung , published in Marx’s native town. Marx
and his adherents withdrew from the democratic organisation
and founded an organisation of their own, the German Workers’
Union, which met at the Cafe de la Picarde in the Rue St.
Denis. This club consisted almost exclusively of workers,
especially tailors and bootmakers, men whom Alphonse Lucas,
the reactionary chronicler of the clubs of this period, sneered
at for arrogating to themselves the right ‘ indiquer d la France
152 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
la mankre dont elk devait se gouverner of showing France how she
ought to be governed. Marx, however, was successful. As
early as March 20 the ambassador of Baden reported to his
Government that Marx’s adherents were ‘very numerous.’
At the beginning of April the Union numbered four hundred
members.
Soon after his arrival in Paris Marx revived his contacts
with French revolutionary circles that he knew from 1844
and 1845. O n the evening of the day on which he left Brussels
he spoke at the club central of the Sociiti des Droits de V Homme et
du Citoyen , the leader of which was Barbas, a Right Blanquist.
Marx’s relations with the groups which were represented in
the Provisional Government by Ledru-Rollin and Flocon were
particularly good. Both these ministers were praised in the
letters Engels wrote his brother-in-law, Emil Blank. Engels
said the workers would hear of no one but Ledru-Rollin, and
they were quite right, because he was more resolute than any
of the others. The men round Ledru-Rollin and Flocon were
Communists without knowing it. Marx and Engels were on
terms of personal friendship with Flocon, whom they frequently
visited. Flocon offered them money to start a newspaper in
Germany, but they did not accept it. Marx’s relations with
Ledru-Rollin and Flocon later changed, but to the end he
criticised them comparatively mildly.
The European movement advanced with a giant’s stride.
‘Marvellous’ news arrived daily. ‘A complete revolution in
Nassau; in Munich students, artists and workers in full insur-
rection; at Cassel revolution is at the gate; in Berlin there
is unbounded fear and trepidation; freedom of the Press and
a national guard proclaimed throughout the West of Germany.
That is enough for a beginning. If only Frederick William IV
remains stubborn! If he does, everything is won and in a few
months we shall have the German revolution. If only he clings
to his feudal ways! But the devil alone knows what that moody,
crazy individual will do next.’ Thus wrote Engels in Brussels
to Marx in Paris on March 8.
On March 19 there was a parade of Herwegh’s Democrats
at the Butte de Monceau, with sabre-rattling, fixing of bayonets,
rifle-practice, marching and counter-marching. At the final
rally Herwegh read a German address to the Polish Democrats.
THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPEST I53
At about four o’clock some thousand men marched back to
Paris in military formation. When they reached it they learned
the news that had just come to Paris: a revolution in Vienna,
Metternich deposed, the Emperor forced to yield to all the
demands of the fighters at the barricades. Tens of thousands
of Frenchmen exuberantly fraternised with the Germans. Next
day there came the news of victory in Berlin. The boldest
dreams were more than fulfilled. Rumours spread beyond
all bounds. The King of Prussia was said to have been arrested
by the insurgents and thrown into prison, Warsaw had risen
and the Russians had been put to flight, and the garrison of
St. Petersburg had hoisted the flag of insurrection.
The legion was no longer to be restrained. It left Paris on
April 1. It was given a magnificent send-off. The son of
Marshal Ney, the Prince of Moscow, made an eloquent speech
in which he referred to the great revolutionary traditions and
spoke of the revolution’s struggle against the bulwark of
absolutism in the north, and then the adventure which was
to end so quickly and so pitifully began. The leaders of the
legion had not yet even decided what they wanted; whether
to kindle a peasant war or march peacefully through Germany,
their weapons in their hands, to attack Russia, or fight a civil
war in Germany until the French advance began. When
Ledru-Rollin tried to find out what the exact aims of Herwegh’s
movement were, he is said to have brought a long conversation
to a close with the words: ‘Ah, now I understand, you want to
take a corps of barricade professors to Germany.’
The ‘barricade professors’ were stopped at Strasbourg. That
they carried with them the heartiest good wishes of the Blan-
quists helped them not at all. Lamartine had very guilefully
and diplomatically done everything in his power to give the
German Government time to prepare their troops for the
legion’s reception. The forces the legion met when it crossed
the Rhine were so infinitely superior and it was so inadequately
armed that it was overwhelmed and beaten at the first
encounter.
This outcome had been foreseen by Marx. He had opposed
the blind, desperate enthusiasm, the reckless, plunging spirit
of the insurgents without heeding the mockery and scorn
heaped upon him as a doctrinaire. In his view it was infinitely
154 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
more important for the revolutionaries to make themselves
acquainted with the programme dictated to them by the
precipitous course of events. The outcry against Marx among
the hyper-revolutionaries had reached its zenith at a moment
when, they believed, all true revolutionaries ought to be
teaching the workers the use of arms, while he spent his time
lecturing them on political economy, damping down their
enthusiasm and turning them into doctrinaires.
The outbreak of revolution in Germany gave the Com-
munists new tasks. Their place was no longer in Paris, but
in the country in which they and they only could show the
working class the way. That country was Germany. Marx
advised the exiles to return to Germany individually and start
building up proletarian organisations.
By a coincidence the leaders of the Communist League left
Paris on the same day as Herwegh’s legion; but without music
and without a speech by the Prince of Moscow. A young
member of Herwegh’s expedition sent a report about it to some
German newspapers. ‘The German Communists left Paris
too,’ he wrote. ‘Unlike the German Democrats, they did not
depart fraternally and sociably, in closed ranks, but each man
went to a different point on his own initiative — travellers each
carrying the salvation of the world in his own breast . 5 The
writer of those lines soon saw how misguided was the contempt
with which he wrote. He was Wilhelm Liebknecht, then aged
twenty-two.
The Communists left Paris. Four and a half years before
Marx had transplanted himself from the Prussia of Frederick
William IV to the Paris of Louis Philippe. Since then there
had been the breach with the Left Hegelians, the arrival at
clarification, the rejection of semi-demi, muddle-headed, senti-
mental Socialism, the Communist Manifesto, the Communist
League. When Marx left Paris the flag of the Republic was
flying from the Palais Royal and Germany was in flames.
CHAPTER XIII
THE ‘MAD YEAR’ IN COLOGNE
I n Germany the members of the Communist League scattered
in all directions. Most of them went to their native town or
to the place where they had lived before going into exile.
Engels spent April and May in the Wuppertal, Wilhelm Wolff
went to Breslau, Schapper to Wiesbaden, Born to Berlin,
Wallau to Mainz. In practically every place where workers’
unions arose in the months that followed the lead was taken
by members of the League or of organisations affiliated to it.
The immediate task was to bring together the workers’
organisations that had been founded before the outbreak of
the Revolution. The first appeal for unity came from the
Mainz Workers’ Educational Union. Marx, who stopped for
two days at Mainz on the way from Paris to Cologne, helped
to draft it.
Marx went to Cologne because he had connections with
that city which had never been entirely broken off during his
years of exile and because Cologne, the biggest city in the most
highly industrialised part of Germany, was the obvious place
for the headquarters of the Communist League. He arrived
on April io, accompanied by Engels and Ernst Dronke, a
gifted young political writer who had earned himself a good
reputation by his books and stories and been made famous
by his big trial for lese-majeste, when he was condemned to two
years’ imprisonment. His daring escape from the fortress of
Wesel made him still more famous.
A branch of the Communist League had existed in Cologne
since the autumn of 1 847. Its leaders were Andreas Gottschalk,
a physician, and August von Willich, a former artillery lieu-
tenant. Both these highly distinctive personalities, each in his
own way characteristic of the ‘mad year’ of 1848, will be
repeatedly mentioned in the pages that follow, and a few words
about their careers will not be out of place.
Gottschalk, son of a Jewish butcher, was born at Dusseldorf
in 1815. He studied medicine and philosophy at Bonn — he
i55
156 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
was at Bonn at the same time as Marx — and passed his finals
with distinction in 1839. In 1840 he started a medical and
surgical practice in Cologne. From the first he worked almost
exclusively in the working-class quarters of the city, as healer,
helper and friend of the poorest workers. ‘It is intelligible,’
states a pamphlet written in his memory in 1849, ‘that the man
who had the most abundant opportunity of observing poverty,
misery and distress at close quarters and was also a warm
sympathiser with the sufferings of the proletariat, who were
almost on the brink of utter destitution — it is readily intelligible,
I say, that such a man should reflect upon the ways and means
of most rapidly and effectively redressing pauperisation and
distress.’ Gottschalk made the workers’ cause his own. The
Cologne workers idolised their warm-hearted doctor and friend.
He was their undisputed leader.
August von Willich was a man of entirely different type.
He was descended from an ancient, aristocratic, military
Prussian family, attended the military academy at Potsdam,
and at the beginning of the forties was a captain in an artillery
brigade stationed in Westphalia. The ideas of the time —
democracy, Socialism, revolutionary substitution of a new
world for the old — found their way even into the stuffy
atmosphere of a Prussian barracks. Willich belonged to the
not so very small group of officers to whom these ideas appealed.
When Lieutenant Fritz Anneke, later Gottschalk’s closest friend
and colleague, was deprived of his officer’s status because of his
courageous avowal of Socialism, Willich wrote an open letter
to the king on his behalf. For this he was placed before a court
of honour and deprived of his rank. He went to Cologne and
joined the local branch of the Communist League. He earned
his living as a carpenter. When the former Prussian army
captain made his way across the Cologne parade ground, as he
did deliberately every morning on his way to work, walking
very slowly past the drilling squads, wearing his leather apron
and with his tools on his back, it had a very provocative effect.
This was just what Willich intended. He wanted to get himself
— and consequently democracy and Socialism — talked about.
The Cologne Communist group attached great importance to
propaganda in the army.
Its members met twice a week, discussed ‘Communism and
THE ‘MAD YEAR 5 IN COLOGNE I57
history,’ and carried on ‘retail propaganda,’ to employ an
expression Gottschalk used in a letter to Hess. The branch
did not yet number twenty members. Its influence on the
working-class population of Cologne was effectively demon-
strated when things started to happen.
The revolution in Paris made a great impression throughout
Germany, but nowhere was its effect so great as in the Rhine-
land. In every Rhineland town petitions to the Government
were drafted, demanding radical reforms in an altogether
unprecedented manner. They were promptly covered with
thousand and tens of thousands of signatures. The initiative
for all this activity came from Cologne, and in Cologne itself
the initiative came from the branch of the Communist League.
On March 3 it organised a mass-meeting outside the town hall.
A deputation led by Gottschalk and Willich appeared in the
council chamber and announced their demands to the startled
city fathers. The four thousand people outside lent emphasis
to what they said. Soldiers were brought to the scene, there
were collisions between them and the demonstrators, the
soldiers fired, there were dead and wounded and Gottschalk,
Willich and Anneke were put under arrest. Three weeks later
they were freed by the victory of the revolution in Berlin. The
demonstration had attained its purpose of setting the movement
on the Rhine under way.
At the end of March, when Gottschalk and his friends were
set at liberty, the situation had completely altered. As Marx
had foreseen, the news that a republican legion was coming
from France to invade Germany had visibly helped the forces
of conservatism. A panic fear of the French seized the south
and west of Germany. The French were visualised going
through the land, looting and burning. The governments of
Germany diligently fostered the general alarm. ‘You have no
idea of how our bourgeoisie fear the word “republic,”’ Gotts-
chalk wrote on March 26 to his friend Hess. ‘For them it is
synonymous with robbery, murder, or a Russian invasion, and
your legions would be so execrated as bands of murderous in-
cendiaries that but few proletarians would come to your aid.’
Georg Weerth wrote to Marx on March 25 almost in the same
terms, also from Cologne. Communism, he added, was a
word people shuddered at, and anyone who came out openly
158 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
as a Communist would be stoned. And when the legion
crossed the frontier and on top of it the rapidly suppressed
Republican rising took place in Baden, the word ‘republic’
took on the most evil connotations, at any rate for the time
being, in people’s minds. Another thing that added strength
to the counter-revolution was that the newspapers printed lies
about letters of Marx said to have been found on captured
leaders of the legion, so that Republican, Communist and
national enemy became synonymous.
A furious hue-and-cry for the ringleaders of the dispersed
demonstration started in Cologne, a ‘veritable battue ,’ as one
newspaper put it, and Willich felt the place had become too
hot to hold him. He went to Baden and took part in the
insurrection there, and Cologne saw him no more. Gottschalk
remained to defy the storm. Finding himself defended by the
moderate Democrats either faint-heartedly or not at all, he
did not mince matters but turned his face from them and
confined the whole of his agitation to the workers. On
April 6, four days before Marx’s arrival in Cologne, he issued
an appeal for the foundation of a ‘Democratic Socialist
Union.’
Three hundred people were present at the inaugural meeting
on April 13. The overwhelming majority were workers. For
this reason they promptly adopted the additional title of
‘Workers’ Union.’ The success of the new organisation was
astonishing. At the beginning of May the newspapers estimated
its membership at between three and four thousand. By the
end of June the membership had risen to nearly eight thousand.
Every one of its meetings at the Giirzenich-haus was packed
to overflowing. The workers in their blouses sat before a plat-
form adorned with the red flag, wearing red sashes across their
breasts, some of them with red Jacobin caps on their heads.
Many of the audience were women, and many were illiterate
workers, porters and boatmen, who were particularly hard hit
by the prevailing unemployment.
Popular as Gottschalk was among the workers of Cologne,
his name alone would not have sufficed to hold this great mass
of people together had he not skilfully and effectively repre-
sented their most immediate interests. The Workers’ Union
was at one and the same time an educational association, a
THE ‘MAD YEAR 5 IN COLOGNE I59
political club, and also a breeding ground of trade unionism.
Gottschalk divided the union into occupational sections, and
what with the prevalent trade crisis — for the employers,
hampered by no law, lowered wages, lengthened hours, gave
their apprentices worse victuals — these sections had enough and
more than enough to do. They worked out wage rates, tried
to establish standards for the working day, busied themselves
with conditions of labour. The workers brought their troubles
and needs to the Union as though it were omnipotent.
It was hated by the employers in proportion. Not only the
employers but the whole propertied class regarded the Workers’
Union as a nefarious assault upon humanity. The most in-
credible rumours gathered round the Union and its president,
Gottschalk, ‘the Communist apostle. 5 One reactionary journal
stated that the demagogue was putting the craziest ideas into
the workers’ heads. The workers no longer worked but spent
all their evenings at the political clubs, from which they went
home drunk and beat their wives and children, whom they
left to starve. Gottschalk was credited with hatching the
most infamous plots. It was said at the end of April that
Gottschalk nightly had ‘terrible troops of workers drilling
with the eleven thousand flints that Abd-el-Kadr had sent
him. 5
However absurd it may sound, all this was taken perfectly
seriously by a great many people. The more sinister the
Workers 5 Union came to appear in the eyes of the property-
owners, the more willingly did they listen to the voice of
reaction. But dislike of the Workers 5 Union was widespread
even among the most democratically-minded artisans of
Cologne. The ‘Association of Employers and Employed, 5 the
leader of which was Hermann Becker, a Democrat, who became
active in the Communist League in 1850 and 1851, though
later he underwent a complete change of view and eventually
became burgomaster of Cologne, was mainly an association
of small master-craftsmen and educated artisans. It took its
stand on the basis of class peace.
Such was the situation when Marx arrived in Cologne. At
first he naturally enough adhered to the party of Gottschalk.
He took part in the first meetings of the Workers 5 Union. But
in a very short time differences of opinion concerning the
l60 KARL MARX.* MAN AND FIGHTER
policy of the Union arose between Gottschalk and him. A
contemporary record has survived of a meeting which took
place shortly after Marx’s arrival between the leaders of the
Communist League on the one side and the members of
the Cologne branch on the other. The discussion is said
to have become ‘very violent’ and Dr. Gottschalk was harshly
criticised in regard to the organisation of the Workers’ Union.
Further information is not available, but from the subsequent
development of the dispute it is safe to conclude that as
soon as he had surveyed the situation in the first few days
after his arrival Marx resolutely opposed Gottschalk’s policy.
The situation in Germany being what it was, Gottschalk’s
programme could not result in anything but parting the
proletariat from the Democratic movement and completely
isolating it.
The Revolution had created, for the first time in German
history, a Parliament for the whole of Germany, including
Austria. The National Assembly was to meet in Frankfurt.
In Prussia a Chamber was to be elected by a secret and universal
indirect ballot. Gottschalk demanded a boycott of the elections
both for the Frankfurt and the Berlin assemblies. He claimed
that indirect voting was objectionable in itself, and besides
there was not sufficient time for the necessary preliminary
campaign. The majority of the workers who supported Gotts-
chalk followed him in this, and other extreme Left groups also
proclaimed an election boycott, in which they may have been
influenced by the example of the Blanquists in France. There
is no doubt that the Blanquist example influenced Gottschalk.
Blanqui was not Gottschalk’s model in this alone. Gottschalk
may well have had some contact with Blanqui as early as 1848.
Herwegh bears witness to his having visited Blanqui in prison
when in Paris at the beginning of 1849.
Marx condemned the extreme Left boycott of the elections
as an idle and futile demonstration, ultra-revolutionary in
form, reactionary in content. By it the Lefts cleared the
political battlefield for the forces of Reaction and the luke-
warm centre. Marx’s dispute with Gottschalk became
intensified.
Gottschalk’s standing out for a boycott was merely the
consequence of his general attitude. He utterly rejected all
THE 'MAD YEAR 5 IN COLOGNE l6l
and every compromise and would not hear of even the most
temporary coalition with non-proletarian Democratic groups.
The probable effects of his demands and slogans on others
than his own followers did not trouble him at all. He con-
ducted his propaganda openly under the Republican banner,
and not just the Republican banner, but the Socialist banner
too — the banner of the Republic of Labour. Gottschalk
simply shut his eyes to the whole political backwardness of
Germany.
The Democrats were not themselves agreed as to how the
three dozen Fatherlands of Germany were to be united. There
were advocates of constitutional monarchy upon the broadest
democratic basis, there were advocates of a ‘republic with
hereditary royal officials , 5 there were those who wanted the
several states to be republics subject to an all-German monarchy,
while others again wanted their own state to be a constitutional
monarchy subject to a German federal republic. Between the
advocates of extreme federalism and extreme centralisation
there were advocates of every conceivable form of compromise.
Even among the Democrats, to say nothing of the Liberals,
there were but few who favoured the ‘one and indivisible
republic’ which was the first of the seventeen demands which
the Communist League formulated and distributed in the form
of a pamphlet. Marx was convinced of this by letters sent him
by friends and sympathisers from all over Germany. Engels
wrote from Barmen: ‘If a single copy of our seventeen points
were distributed here, as far as we were concerned all would
be lost . 5 Marx issued warnings against illusory hopes in the
JVeue Rheinische £eitung not long afterwards. ‘We do not at the
outset make the Utopian demand for a single and indivisible
German republic , 5 he wrote, ‘but we demand of the so-called
Radical-Democratic Party that it do not confound the point of
departure of the struggle and of the revolutionary movement
with its final aims. It is not now a matter of realising this or
that point of view, this or that political idea, but of insight into
the course of development. The National Assembly (in Frank-
furt) has only to perform the immediate and practically possible
steps . 5
In these circumstances Gottschalk’s line of action meant
parting the advanced workers not only from the Liberal and
ii
162 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Democratic bourgeoisie but also from the great mass of the
workers themselves. It meant destroying the coalition of pro-
letariat and revolutionary bourgeoisie in the struggle against
absolutism, a coalition that the Communist Manifesto had
proclaimed as inevitable but temporary.
Marx’s attitude was clearly defined in the very first months
of revolution. He was opposed to coming out prematurely
and independently with the seventeen points. ‘When we
founded a great newspaper in Germany,’ Engels wrote in
1884, ‘the banner for us to take our stand under presented
itself. It could only be the banner of democracy, but the
banner of a democracy which emphasised its specifically
proletarian character in details only, since it was not yet
possible to proclaim its proletarian character once and for all.
Had we been unwilling to do this ... we should have had
no choice but to content ourselves with teaching the doctrines
of Communism in an obscure local paper and founding a small
sect instead of a great party of action. The time had passed
for us to be preachers in the wilderness. We had studied the
Utopians too well not to know that. We had not drafted our
programme for that.’
In the middle of April Marx and his friends participated in
the formation of the Democratic Union in Cologne. It did
not at first stand out in any particular way, but took the line
that the form of government of the future united Germany
should be left to be decided by the National Assembly at
Frankfurt and that the relations between throne and people
in Prussia should be left to the Chamber in Berlin. This
evasion of a clear answer to the most elementary questions left
the members of the Democratic Union more than dissatisfied.
Someone at the meeting asked what the members of the
Democratic Union wanted themselves. Seven-eighths of them
were in favour of a republic, as the discussion showed, but no
resolution in favour of a republic was made. The few who had
not yet made up their minds should not be antagonised and
driven over to the moderates.
The Democratic Union’s first definite action was taking part
in the elections for Frankfurt and Berlin. Marx’s critics main-
tained that thanks to his tactics not so much as a single
Democrat was sent to Parliament, but only a fortuitous Left
THE C M AD YEAR 5 IN COLOGNE 163
of the type of Franz Raveaux, whom Marx himself was very
soon forced to criticise in the JVeue Rheinische J^eitung. But there
is no doubt that but for the Democratic Union Cologne would
have been represented by Rights and moderates only.
The Communist League was not equal to the situation the
Revolution had created. It was inadequate in every way. It
very soon demonstrated itself to be incomparably weaker in
Germany than the central office had supposed. All the
emissaries of the League, who were dispersed in every direction,
were unanimous to that effect. In Berlin there was no organ-
isation whatsoever, and the handful of approximately twenty
sympathisers had practically no contact with each other. In
Breslau the League was entirely unrepresented. In Mainz the
organisation was on the point of collapse, and in other centres
the story was the same. The League’s emissaries were certainly
not lacking in energy and enthusiasm, but the branches, in
the places where they did manage to found them, very soon
demonstrated that they had no real life in them. All the really
active members devoted themselves to legal work in the
workers 5 unions, on newspapers and so forth. Marx refused
to keep the Communist League alive artificially and go on
leading a movement because it had once existed. Besides,
there were difficulties Marx had to contend with within the
League itself.
In Marx’s opinion the appearance of the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung did away with the excuse even for the appearance of
the Communist League’s existence. A secret organisation had
become entirely superfluous, and all that Marx had to say,
all the general guidance he had to offer, could be made public
through the Press. Because of the infinite variety of conditions
in Germany, which varied from state to state and from province
to province, it was not possible to give more than general
guidance. Marx therefore proposed to the central office that
the League be dissolved. Schapper and the other members
of the London group put up some opposition to this course.
Though they agreed with him on general political questions
and sided with him in the struggle with Gottschalk, they had
lived in the League and with the League and for the League
and it had been dear to them too long for them to be able
to consent to its dissolution. So Marx, in the words of a
164 KARL MARX.‘ MAN AND FIGHTER
contemporary, ‘made use of his discretionary powers and
dissolved the League. 5
Gottschalk had agreed with Marx with regard to the disso-
lution of the League. In the Workers 5 Union he had an
incomparably more powerful weapon than the small local
branch of the Communist League, so he was able to watch it
die with a light heart. Another motive may also have in-
fluenced him. He wanted to sever all party connection with
Marx in order to be able to attack him with the less restraint.
Even before the appearance of the Neue Rheinische fitting sharp
collisions arose between Marx 5 s % and Gottschalk’s followers.
After the collapse of the republican rising in Baden, Willich
fled to France and gathered the fugitives at Bcsangon. Most
of them were workers, and their state was so piteous that
Willich appealed to the Democrats in Germany to assist them.
Anneke had joined the Democratic Union in spite of his
friendship with Gottschalk. At a meeting of the Union he rose,
read Willich’s letter of appeal and proposed that the Union
collect money for the Republican refugees at Besan^on. A
lively discussion ended in a vote heavily turning down the
proposal. Anneke was the only one to vote for it. According
to the newspapers the Democrats, in spite of their sympathy
for the hungering and exiled worker-refugees, declined to help
them because doing so might be interpreted as approval of
the policy by which they had been guided. Anneke resigned
from the Democratic Union. At his and Gottschalk’s suggestion
the Workers 5 Union started a collection which raised quite a
respectable sum. That made it perfectly clear, of course,
that Marx and his Democrats were cowardly and inhuman,
while Gottschalk and the Workers 5 Union were noble and
courageous Republicans.
Marx’s name had not yet been mentioned and the second
attack was not directed openly at him, either, but at the Neue
Rheinische £eitung, the first number of which had recently ap-
peared. The printer did not pay the wages which the Workers 5
Union was trying to establish as the minimum for the trade.
No other printer in Cologne paid the minimum wage either,
but Gottschalk had no need to mention that. The editorial
staff of the Neue Rheinische £eitung, i.e. Marx, had nothing what-
ever to do with the printer and the wages he paid his staff.
THE ‘MAD YEAR’ IN COLOGNE 165
Gottschalk’s newspaper started a violent campaign against the
Neue Rheinische fitting, which described itself as an organ of
democracy but was in the hands of a group of inveterate
aristocrats — indeed the most dangerous kind, money-aristocrats.
They were ‘trampling on the proletariat and betraying the
people . 5
Marx had just obtained an organ in which he could state his
position clearly. His task was by no means confined to defend-
ing himself against the agitation carried on against him by
the ultra-Lefts in Cologne. The paper was to be a substitute
for the Communist League throughout Germany, and over
and above that the organ of the ‘great party of action 5 of the
German Revolution. A few radicals, in particular Georg
Weerth and Heinrich Blirgers, both friends of Marx from
earlier years, had busied themselves with the project of founding
a newspaper before Marx’s arrival in Cologne. Btirgers was
no Communist, and the paper was not originally intended to
be more than a local Cologne newspaper, and Marx had not
been intended to work on it. When he arrived he was advised
to go to Berlin. He declined. ‘We knew the Berlin of that
time only too well from personal observation , 5 Engels wrote
later, ‘Berlin with its barely arisen bourgeoisie, its loquacious
but timid and obsequious lower middle-class, its completely
undeveloped workers, its teeming bureaucracy, its swarms of
nobles and courtiers . 5 The decisive factor, however, was that
the Code NapoUon was in force in Cologne, involving freedom
of the Press, which was not even remotely conceivable in
Berlin even after the events of March.
Marx succeeded in gaining control of the paper within a
very short time. For this purpose it was necessary to secure
the consent of the Cologne Democrats. The newspaper had
to be ‘edited from the German Democratic viewpoint, which
regarded the question of whether Germany should have a
monarchy or a republic as an open one, though it gave the
advantage to the republican idea both from the practical and
the theoretical point of view . 5 This was how Biirgers formu-
lated the conditions on which the editorship would be given
to Marx. Burgers was himself on the editorial board. Marx
naturally accepted these terms.
There w^s greater difficulty in raising the money for the
l66 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
paper than its backers had expected. The upper bourgeoisie
would have nothing whatever to do with the Democrats,
particularly with those suspected of having anything whatever
to do with Communism. Marx appealed to Engels to try to
place some of the shares in the Wuppertal. His success was
meagre. According to his son, old Engels would rather send
him a thousand bullets than a thousand thalers. Marx did
not fare much better in Cologne. Meanwhile events were
pressing. The National Assembly met at Frankfurt and from
the first day showed itself so timid, so undecided, so conscience-
stricken that the future of this half-revolution seemed to
promise the worst. It was essential that the paper should
appear as soon as possible. Marx plunged his hand in his own
pocket and produced every penny he possessed. All the money
available, such as it was, was laid down, and the first number
of the Neue Rkeinische %eitung appeared on June I, 1848.
With the exception of Burgers, the editorial board consisted
entirely of ex-members of the Communist League: Dronke,
Weerth, Ferdinand Wolff, Wilhelm Wolff. Marx was the
editor. The organisation of the editorial staff, in the words
of Engels, was ‘a simple dictatorship by Marx. A great daily
which had to be ready by a definite time could not maintain
a consistent attitude in any other way. Marx’s dictatorship
was accepted as a matter of course. It was undisputed and
gladly acknowledged by us all. It was above all his clear
views and firm principles that made it the most famous
newspaper of the revolutionary years.’
Marx’s editorship was distinguished by the fact that he did
not publish any general theoretical articles of the kind that
filled the other Democratic newspapers of the time to a surfeit.
Facts were the language of the Neue Rheiniscke fitting. While
Democratic professors explained the advantages of the repub-
lican form of government at interminable length — to which
they were particularly prone in the South German Press —
lectures of this kind were completely absent from the Neue
Rheinische Z eitung . The reason for this was not alone because
of the agreement with Burgers. Marx’s task was to give his
readers an ‘insight into the course of development.’ The way
in which Marx presented his facts, made them demonstrate
the inevitability of a republican solution, was the most effective
THE ‘MAD YEAR 5 IN COLOGNE 167
possible propaganda for republicanism, though the word was
never mentioned.
The paper’s policy was determined by Marx and Marx
alone. Marx edited it as he had edited the Rheinische fitting
five years before. Just as behind every word of the Rheinische
Zeitung there had been the voice of Marx, so did he now make
every word of the Neue Rheinische fitting his own. The paper
called itself the ‘organ of democracy 5 and in speaking of the
battle-front against the forces of feudal absolutism it used the
phrase ‘we Democrats. 5 During the first months it avoided
anything that might possibly disturb the united front. Not
a word was spoken of the antagonism between proletarian and
non-proletarian, bourgeois or petty-bourgeois democracy.
There was not a word about the special interests of the working
classes, of the workers’ special tasks in the German Revolution.
Neither Engels or Marx wrote a word about the position of
the workers until the end of 1848. Engels, writing to Marx
from Barmen before the appearance of the paper, expressed
himself very strongly on this question of the policy of the
united front at any price. ‘The workers are beginning to stir
a little, still very crudely, but in a mass. That, however, does
not suit us ,’ he wrote. The proletariat must march in the great
democratic battle-line, always at the extreme Left wing, always
taking care not to lose connection with the rest of the army.
It must be at its most impetuous in attack, its fighting spirit
must animate the host in the storming of the Bastille. For the
Bastille is not yet taken, Marx cried to those who threatened to
tire, absolutism is not defeated yet. As long as the Bastille is
still standing the Democrats must remain united. The prole-
tariat must not isolate itself; however difficult the task may
be, it must reject everything tending to divide it from the
rest.
The Communist Manifesto had allotted the Communist
Party a twofold task, not only that of taking part in the
common struggle of the bourgeoisie against the reactionary
classes but of ‘instilling into the workers the clearest possible
recognition of the antagonism between bourgeoisie and prole-
tariat, so that the German workers may straightway use as
so many weapons against the bourgeoisie the social and
political conditions which the bourgeoisie must necessarily
l68 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
introduce with their supremacy, and in order that the fight
against the bourgeoisie may immediately begin after the down-
fall of the reactionary classes . 5
First the bourgeoisie must come into power, but really into
power. The proletariat must support it in this, urge it forward,
pitilessly scourge every weakness, every hesitation, every com-
promise the bourgeoisie might want to make with the forces of
reaction. But so long as the revolutionary advance of the
bourgeoisie continued it must maintain a united front with it.
After the victory the united front must be destroyed. Once
the bourgeoisie had in all essentials got the power, the struggle
against it would begin. In Germany it could not, must not
begin yet. In France and England it was different.
The Neue Rheinische Zjeitung gave more space to events abroad
than any other German paper. What had already come to
pass in France and England must come to pass in Germany
to-morrow. There could be no better way of creating the
‘clearest possible awareness of the antagonism between bour-
geoisie and proletariat 5 than by constantly drawing the workers 5
attention to events abroad. But in Germany the Bastille must
first be stormed. In Germany compromise was inevitable.
In Germany ‘we Democrats’ must fight shoulder to shoulder
until victory was gained. In France the time for compromise
had passed. Strenuously as Marx avoided anything that might
have weakened the joint Democratic forces in Germany, he
sided just as resolutely with the insurrectionary Paris workers
in those days of June.
Consideration for his allies in the struggles did not mean
that he spared their weaknesses. The Neue Rheinische £eitung
treated its contemptible opponents, the monarchy, the military
camarilla, the whole of the forces of reaction, with the greatest
contempt. That goes without saying. It poured just as much
scorn and contempt upon the irresolution and pusillanimity
of the Left. The revolution had not yet been accomplished.
It was an illusion to suppose that nothing was left now but to
gather in its fruits. Th& Assembly at Frankfurt was only a
timid beginning, and if it stood still it must be whipped
forward. ‘The very first number began with an article which
ridiculed the ineffectiveness of the Frankfurt Parliament, the
uselessness of its long-winded speeches, the vanity of its timid
THE C MAD YEAR’ IN COLOGNE l6g
resolutions. It cost us half our shareholders.’ Engels still
remembered that with pleasure nearly forty years later.
War with Russia would drive the revolution forward, cut
off every possibility of a bourgeois retreat, destroy half-slain
feudalism with a single mighty blow. The Netie Rheinische
£eitung demanded it from the very first day. There was no
other way of freeing Poland than by war. Russia was the main-
stay of European reaction; it must be overthrown in war.
With every month it became clearer that only war with Russia
could save the German Revolution. The German Revolution
had got stuck in ‘a tedious philistine cul-de-sac as Engels
complained in September, 1848. It failed to overcome the
old impediment of its division into innumerable petty states.
Prussia, though it had sustained some heavy blows, was funda-
mentally intact, and remained the single serious internal
opponent. Austria stood firm in spite of all shocks and
threatened to become strong once more. The only possibility
of uniting Germany was for Germany to make a united war on
Russia. ‘If Germany could be brought to war with Russia,
it would be all up with Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns, and the
Revolution would be victorious all along the line. 5 Marx
scarcely expected the war to revolutionise Russia. The
liberation of Poland, though a desired aim, was nevertheless
a by-product. The war must be fought for the salvation and
completion of the German revolutionary will. The Tsar would
be the saviour of the German Revolution, because he would
centralise it. That was how Marx regarded the question of war.
But the Tsar hesitated and did not attack the Revolution,
and the Revolution in its turn was too feeble, too little
centralised, to take the offensive itself.
A perceptible change took place in Cologne after Marx
started addressing the workers directly. The Neue Rheinische
Zjeitung found its way to the workers and to the members of
Gottschalk’s Union, who obviously started by mistrusting it.
The Workers 5 Union published a pitiful little sheet which
contained practically nothing but minutes of Union meetings
and short paragraphs about the workers’ everyday life. It did
not satisfy even the most modest demands. Complaints about
it were made at meetings, but Gottschalk, a good speaker and
organiser, ^as a less than mediocre journalist.
170 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Marx’s field of activity also extended in another direction.
The various Democratic Unions, which were distributed all
over Germany, sent their representatives to a Congress which
took place in Frankfurt-on- Main on June 14 and 15. The
Workers’ Union in Cologne also took part in it. If Gottschalk
had been consistent he would have boycotted the Democratic
Congress just as he had boycotted the two Parliaments. He
did not do so. The Workers’ Union sent him to Frankfurt as
their only delegate, because ‘Gottschalk alone was completely
competent to represent the Workers’ Union of Cologne.’ He
was to demand an open avowal of a republic and an open
disavowal of the Frankfurt and Berlin Parliaments.
Gottschalk played an important role at the Democratic
Congress. One delegate described him as a man ‘born to be
a dictator, possessing indefatigable energy and intelligence as
sharp as a guillotine, an image of Robespierre.’ Of the two
resolutions that he proposed the anti-Parliamentary one was
rejected and the other accepted with a highly significant
alteration. A Democratic republic was declared to be not, as
Gottschalk demanded, the ‘only possible’ system of government
but as the ‘only tenable’ one. He did not leave the Congress
on this account but actually gave his vote in favour of the
resolutions which determined the constitution of the Union
itself. These declared the Neue Rheinische fitting to be one of
the three official organs of the Democratic Party, and appealed
to all Democratic associations existing at any one place to
unite.
Three organisations had sent their representatives to the
Congress from Cologne: the Workers’ Union, the Democratic
Union and the Association of Employers and Employed.
These ought now to have united. Gottschalk wanted a com-
plete fusion of the three, which, in view of the great numerical
preponderance of the Workers’ Union, would have meant the
complete submergence of the other two organisations in his.
The Democratic Union declined to be submerged and proposed
that a bureau of co-operation be created instead. Negotiations
were still in progress when events occurred which fundamentally
altered the situation of the Cologne Democrats.
The bourgeoisie were not alone in their hatred of Gottschalk.
The police had had an eye on him for a long tinje, and they
THE C MAD YEAR 5 IN COLOGNE 171
stepped in now. According to the police report Gottschalk
and Anneke were said to have proposed to the Workers’ Union
‘the foundation of a republic by violent means.’ Gottschalk
and Anneke were arrested on July 3. The prison gates closed
behind them for six months.
An interregnum in the Workers’ Union now began. Not
one of Gottschalk’s adherents was capable of replacing him.
Joseph Moll was elected temporary president. Although he
was an opponent of Gottschalk’s, his energy, courage and know-
ledge had earned him general respect. He and Schapper now
became the leaders of the Union, and both of them were
political partisans of Marx. An attempt to attack Marx from
another quarter miscarried. Marx’s old opponent, Wilhelm
Weitling, came to Cologne in the middle of July. On July 21,
at the Democratic Union, he made ‘an exciting speech in
which he proclaimed the necessity of a complete reorganisation
of our political and social institutions,’ in the words of a
newspaper favourably disposed towards him. This speech was
reported in full in the official organ of the Democratic Union.
In America Weitling had learned nothing whatever. He still
preached government by the ‘judicious’ because neither in
Germany nor in America nor even in the Democratic Union,
as he not very politely added, was the mob capable of recog-
nising where its real interests lay. Marx answered him at
a meeting on August 4. In their social development, he said,
the Germans were now where the French had been in 1789.
To set up a dictatorship to realise any one man’s ideas would
be absurd. The sovereign power, as in the case of the pro-
visional government in Paris, must be formed of the most
heterogeneous elements, which then, by the exchange of ideas,
must decide on the most effective method of government.
The drafting of the report cannot be said to be very clear, but
Marx’s line of argument can be detected through the muddled
statement. He demanded that the German Revolution be
completed, the bourgeois revolution, the German 1789, repre-
senting the coalition of all the forces of Democracy, all ‘the
highly heterogeneous elements.’
In the meantime a joint committee of Cologne Democrats
had been formed. Marx and Schneider, a lawyer, represented
the Democratic Union, Schapper and Moll the Workers’
172 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
Union, and two others represented the Association of Em-
ployers and Employed. This combination assured the leader-
ship of Marx. The committee displayed tremendous activity.
In the middle of August it organised the first Rhineland
Democratic Congress, at which forty delegates represented
sixteen organisations. Marx was the life and soul of the
Congress. Karl Schurz, the German-American statesman, who
was a young student at Bonn at the time, described forty years
later the impression that Marx made upon him. ‘Marx was
thirty years old and already the recognised head of a school
of Socialism. A thick-set, powerful man, with his high fore-
head, his pitch-black hair and beard and his dark, flashing
eyes, he immediately attracted general attention. He had the
reputation of great learning in his subject, and what he said
was in fact solid, logical and clear.’ People with unclear minds
were always repelled by Marx’s clarity and logic. Schurz
was of the opinion that he had never met a man of such
wounding and intolerable arrogance of manner. He never
forgot the tone of biting contempt with which he uttered,
almost spat the word ‘bourgeois.’ Albert Brisbane, corre-
spondent of the New York Tribune , who was staying in Cologne
at the time, also saw Marx but saw him through different
eyes. ‘His features gave one the impression of great energy,
and behind his sober-minded reserve one could see the
passionate fire of a courageous spirit.’
The more outspoken the Neue Rheinische fyitung became, the
more energetically it denounced the Lefts for an irresolution
bordering on cowardice if not positive treason to the Revolu-
tion, the more plainly it hinted that the co-operation of bour-
geoisie and proletariat could only be temporary, however
necessary it might be in Germany at the moment, the more
alarmed the shareholders became. Half of them were lost as
soon as the newspaper appeared, and articles about the June
fighting cost Marx the other half. The paper was brought
sharply up against serious practical difficulties. The printer
refused to extend credit any further, and one issue of the paper
failed to appear. Fortunately another printer was found, but
the position became so threatening that at the end of August
Marx had to undertake a journey through Germany and
Austria to raise the funds necessary to continue His travels
THE ‘MAD YEAR 5 IN COLOGNE 1 73
took him to Berlin, to Vienna, then to Berlin again. In Vienna
Marx addressed the local Democratic Union and he lectured
on wage-labour and capital at the First Vienna Workers’
Union. In both cities he negotiated with the leaders of Left
organisations. Whether he obtained the assistance he required
is not known. All that is known is that the Neue Rheinische
fitting received very generous support from the Polish Demo-
crats. On September 18 Vladislav Koscielsky sent the Neue
Rheinische £eitung two thousand thalers in their name.
Marx returned to Cologne just when the events of September,
the stormiest period of the ‘mad year 5 in Cologne, were begin-
ning. Their outbreak coincided with the resignation of the
Prussian ministry of Auerswald-Hansemann. Marx had casti-
gated it for the cowardice with which it retreated step by step
before the forces of reaction, which were growing bolder every
day. Incompetent a government as it had been, it had by no
means been reactionary in intent, and all the key positions
in it had been occupied by members of the bourgeoisie. Its
resignation was an indication of the impending crash. Marx
summoned the Democrats to mass action. In the midst of this
critical situation a number of clashes which had been brewing
for a long time and had no connection, at least no direct
connection, with the political change of scene, broke out in
Cologne. In Cologne, as everywhere else along the Rhine,
feelings between townsmen and soldiery were very strained.
The garrisons consisted predominantly of troops from east of
the Elbe and were systematically incited against the people
by their officers. There had been serious collisions between
military and civilians in Mainz and Aachen during the past
spring. Cologne’s turn came now. Soldiers attacked and beat
civilians without any cause whatever. There was general
indignation at this, and it was by no means confined to the
Democrats. It was widespread among the otherwise entirely
‘loyal’ population. The editorial staff of the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung took the protest in hand. Wilhelm Wolff and Engels
summoned an open-air mass-meeting at which the brutality
of the soldiery was denounced and a committee of public
safety, thirty strong, was elected to prevent a repetition of such
attacks. Marx was a member of the committee.
To the excitement caused by these events in Cologne there
174 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
was now added indignation at the advance of reaction in
Prussia and at the Prussian armistice with Denmark. This
indignation swept through the whole of Germany and created
a situation which caused many to believe that the outbreak of
a second revolution was at hand. To the Democrats and
Liberals, even the most moderate of them, the war with
Denmark was an affair of the whole of the German people.
Schleswig-Holstein was German territory subject to the Danish
throne; to liberate it from its Danish overlords was one of the
foremost tasks of the United Germany movement. When the
war broke out students and workers who had just been fighting
at the barricades in Berlin hurried to volunteer for the army.
The struggle for Schleswig-Holstein had become a symbol of
German unity. And now Prussia signed an armistice with
Denmark. That meant its abandonment of the United German
front and its return to the old, purely Prussian and purely
dynastic policy. The armistice at Malmo was felt as a deliberate
challenge, an insolent slap in the nation’s face. As for the
National Assembly, it vacillated, swung unworthily this way
and that, and on September 16 expressed its consent to the
armistice.
On September 17, a huge mass-meeting gathered at Wor-
ringen, near Cologne. It was attended by delegations from
innumerable Rhineland towns and many peasants from the
surrounding district. It resolved, on Engels’s proposal, that
should Prussia and the National Assembly at Frankfurt come
into conflict they would stand by Germany through thick
and thin. 5 That the National Assembly had capitulated to
Prussia in the meantime was not yet known at Cologne. When
the news arrived anger knew no bounds. Indignation was
widespread throughout Germany. There was serious fighting
in Frankfurt on September 18, and two of the most hated
reactionary deputies were lynched. The Democratic Union
and the Workers’ Union at Cologne declared their solidarity
with the fighters at the Frankfurt barricades and the JVeue
Rheinische Z € ^ un S started a subscription fund for the insur-
rectionaries and their families. Next day the king appointed
General Pfuel Prime Minister of Prussia. Pfuel was hated
by the Democrats as the oppressor of the Poles. His nomination
only served to pour oil on the flames.
THE ‘MAD YEAR 5 IN COLOGNE 175
The military had made their preparations, the troops in
the fortresses were ready for action and guns were directed
on the town. The second Rhineland Democratic Congress
was intended to meet on September 25. On that day, at
seven o’clock in the morning, Hermann Becker and Karl
Schapper were arrested. Moll escaped arrest because a crowd
quickly gathered and prevented the police from seizing him.
The City Militia refused to help the police. The whole city
was in an uproar. Marx hurried to the Workers’ Union. He
and Burgers, who were informed of the situation in full,
‘declared in the name of the Congress that in no circumstances,
least of all at the present moment, did they want a rising.’
The workers, exasperated at the loss of their leaders, listened
‘with gloomy looks.’ Other meetings took place, here and
there people actually started putting up barricades, but no
actual fighting took place. The preponderance of the military
was so great that the City Militia, who in any case were not
so very determined to carry matters to extremes, held back,
and the workers, unarmed or badly armed, could not fight
alone. The outbreak must not be confined to Cologne and
could not start yet. The crisis must first become even more
acute. Marx declined to consent to a local riot. Germany was
not ready for a general rising yet.
Not a single shot had been fired in Cologne, but the military
wished to savour their triumph to the full. Martial law was
proclaimed, all political associations were dissolved, all meetings
were forbidden, and the radical papers, starting with the Neue
Rkeinische fitting, were suspended. The reactionary Press
could scarcely contain itself with joy at the end of its hated
enemies. ‘The entire editorial staffs have had to take flight,’
it exulted. This was an exaggeration. Warrants were issued
for the arrest of Engels, Dronke and the two Wolffs. Marx
not having spoken at any public meeting, the police had no
excuse for taking proceedings against him. But the position
of the newspaper was more than difficult. Besides Marx, only
Georg Weerth, who was in charge of the feuilleton , remained.
All the rest of the staff had been forced to fly.
If the Reaction thought the time had come for rejoicing,
they rejoiced a little too soon. Marx had no intention of
laying down his arms. In spite of the paper’s financial position,
176 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
which was now, of course, more desperate than ever, he
promptly opened negotiations to continue publication at
Dlisscldorf should the state of martial law be prolonged.
The negotiations turned out to be superfluous. The un-
necessary declaration of martial law roused even the tamest
citizens of Cologne against the military command. The city
council unanimously demanded its withdrawal. There were
debates about* it in the Berlin Chamber, and they were very
embarrassing to the Government. On October 3 the military
authorities withdrew martial law very reluctantly, but under
orders from Berlin. The Neue Rheinische fitting appeared
again a week later. Marx prominently announced that the
editorial staff remained unchanged, but with the addition
of Ferdinand Freiligrath, who had just been acquitted of a
charge of high treason. Before the period of martial law the
newspaper had had six thousand subscribers, which placed
it in the front rank of German newspapers in circulation as well
as in influence. In a short time it reached its old position
and even surpassed it.
Marx’s influence on the Workers’ Union had grown stronger
and stronger. It was only natural that the Union should now
invite him to become its leader. It had lost its president for the
second time since Gottschalk’s arrest. Moll was a fugitive and
Schapper in prison. A delegation approached Marx, but it
was only after a good deal of hesitation that he agreed to accept
the position. He explained his reasons at a meeting on October
16. His position in Cologne was precarious. He was no longer
a Prussian subject, and although the Cologne Council had
granted him a permit to stay in the city, the State authorities
would not hear of his being renaturalised. Besides, he would
shortly have to appear before a jury because of an alleged
offence against the Press Laws, to say nothing of his being
overwhelmed with work on account of the temporary dispersal
of the editorial committee of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
‘Nevertheless,’ according to the minutes of the meeting, ‘he
was prepared temporarily to comply with the wish of the
workers until Dr. Gottschalk should be released. Government
and bourgeoisie must be convinced that despite all persecution
there are always people ready to place themselves at the
workers’ disposal.’
THE C M AD YEAR 5 IN COLOGNE 177
Marx, who had in effect been president of the Workers’
Union ever since the temporary election of Moll to that
position, now became its president in name as well. It was
the outward sign of his victory in the struggle he had been
carrying on for six months in the ranks of the workers’
organisations and the Communist League in Cologne.
12
CHAPTER XIV
DEFEAT WITH HONOUR
The reactionary Press poured scorn on the workers for their
‘cowardice’ in retreating when things grew difficult. Marx
denied that it was cowardice. It merely meant that they were
not reckless. The moment for a general rising would only
come when great questions and mighty events urged the united
population into battle.
The October rising should have been such a moment. The
revolutionaries of Vienna rose once more, in alliance with
Kossuth’s Hungary, to fight the decisive battle with the re-
habilitated forces of Habsburg absolutism. On its outcome
depended not the victory or defeat of the Revolution in Austria
alone. The fate of the whole German Revolution would be
decided in Vienna. If the Habsburgs conquered, so would the
Hohenzollerns, and March would have been in vain. For
Germany’s sake they must not win.
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung issued impassioned appeals to
the Democrats of Germany, employed its most powerful argu-
ments, used the glowing verses of Freiligrath, urging them to
make Vienna’s cause their own:
Wenn wir noch knien konnten, wir l&gen auf den Knien,
Wenn wir noch beten konnten, wir beteten fur Wien . 1
The Left produced their usual resounding rhetorical phrases
in praise of the Viennese. But they failed to understand, would
not listen, no longer had the strength to carry out the task of
the moment: that of defending Vienna in Berlin, Dresden and
Frankfurt. Germany’s calamitous division into minor states
meant that every general question assumed a variety of local
forms — a Prussian form, a Saxon form, a Badenese form, a
Bavarian form and so on. As local questions they were
incapable of solution. There could be only one German
1 If wc could only kneel we should go down on our knees,
If we could only pray, we should pray for Vienna . 1
178
DEFEAT WITH HONOUR 1 79
Revolution. The alternative was the German counter-
revolution.
The second Democratic Congress met in Berlin at the end of
October. There were debates and more debates, and the time
was frittered away with eloquent but empty speeches. In its
appeal for the Viennese ‘pulpit pathos 5 was substituted for
‘revolutionary energy , 5 in the words of Marx. Germany did
not rise, and Vienna was left to its fate. The imperial troops
entered the Austrian capital on November 1.
Prussia’s turn, quite logically, came next. On November 2
PfuePs cabinet resigned in Berlin. It was not reactionary
enough for the king, who felt himself strong enough now.
The new Prime Minister he appointed was Count Branden-
burg, an illegitimate son of Frederick William II. Brandenburg
ordered the Berlin Parliament out of Berlin. It was unwilling
to go, so a regiment of guards quite easily dispersed it. In
March the king had said that soldiers were the only thing of
any use against Democrats.
The Assembly opposed force not with force but with phrases.
It had spent its whole time retreating step by step. Now, when
its members should have organised armed resistance, acted
like revolutionaries, ready to face every peril, even a sanguinary
defeat, which would have been a thousand times better
guarantee of a resurrection than a timid capitulation, the
Chamber ceremoniously ‘took its stand on the law . 5 The
soldiers, of course, took their stand on the more solid ground of
Berlin. The Chamber offered passive resistance, which meant
in effect no resistance at all. The utmost to which they roused
themselves was to issue an appeal to the country not to pay
taxes to an unconstitutional government.
That was only the first and most obvious answer to the
reactionary onslaught. Marx had proclaimed a tax-boycott
in the Rhineland before the Chamber made its decision. Now
blow after blow must inevitably follow. Cologne waited for
the sign of battle from the capital. News was spread that the
Berlin City Militia had refused to hand over their arms. This
was the moment that Marx had been waiting for. Now the
hour had struck. He appealed to the West of Germany to go
to the assistance of Berlin, ‘with men and arms . 5
But the news was false. The people of Berlin remained quiet.
l8o KARL MARXl MAN AND FIGHTER
The City Militia handed over their arms. Junker officers
promenaded up and down Unter den Linden as of yore, full
of contempt for the civilian rabble. Even the forcible dispersal
of the Prussian National Assembly failed to enliven the feeble
glow of the German Revolution.
Cologne was swarming with soldiers. The military were
thirsting for an opportunity to shoot and stab to right and left
to their heart’s content. It would have been madness to have
stood up to be butchered by them. Marx issued warnings
against false heroism. At the same time he did everything
possible to extend the movement. To open an attack in Cologne
alone would merely have resulted in the riot he had condemned
as hopeless in September. Berlin did not stir. But at all costs
something must be done. The German Revolution must not
be allowed to go down to defeat so ignominiously.
On November 18 Marx, jointly with Schapper and the
lawyer, Schneider, issued an appeal for a tax-boycott in the
name of the Rhineland district Democratic committee. Passive
resistance presupposed active resistance, the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung proclaimed, otherwise it would be equivalent to the
struggles of a calf in the slaughter-house. Marx therefore
appealed for a general levy of the people, of all men of military
age, for the distribution of weapons, for the forming of com-
mittees of public safety and for the removal of officials who
remained faithful to the Government.
The Prussian National Assembly might still, perhaps, have
been able to carry the people with it, although the most
favourable moment had passed. But it grew afraid of its own
courage. It had been banished by the king to the reactionary
little country town of Brandenburg.
It spent two weeks raging and fuming and then, with
plaintive whines and ineffectual murmurs, went to Branden-
burg. Once there it was promptly dissolved.
On December 5, 1848, Prussia was granted a new consti-
tution.
A rising for such a Chamber, a popular revolution for the
benefit of a bourgeoisie such as this would have been senseless.
Marx explained to a Cologne jury a few weeks later what the
struggle was about. ‘What confronted us,’ he told them, ‘was
the struggle between ancient feudal bureaucraqy and modern
DEFEAT WITH HONOUR l8l
bourgeois society, the fight between the society of landed
property and industrial society, between the society of faith
and the society of knowledge . 5 Between these two forms of
societies there could only be a struggle to the death. But the
bourgeoisie, who should have fought for their own interests,
their class interests, cried off, shirked, evaded their task. They
wanted the revolution, they could not help wanting it, but they
shrank from the cost. They cast fearful glances at the masses
whom they had set in motion because they themselves were too
weak to face feudalism alone, the masses whom they also
feared. For behind their own revolution they could already
perceive the second revolution lurking, the revolution that
would be against them. Lacking initiative, lacking faith in the
people and faith in themselves, they failed to exert the strength
to seize the power as they might have seized it. They did not
even go half-way. They allowed the whole of the old state
apparatus to remain intact, in the ingenuous hope of establish-
ing their supremacy and preserving it with its help. The
nobility, the army, the bureaucracy allowed them to hold sway
as long as the elementary popular movement threatened to
sweep everything away. The bourgeoisie were good enough as
a screen to shelter behind, while danger threatened. As soon
as they were no longer necessary for this purpose the feudal
classes dispensed with their services.
The experiences of the past nine months had made one thing
plain beyond all doubt. Vienna and Berlin, the Prussian
Chamber and the National Assembly at Frankfurt, the speech-
making and still more the behaviour of the parties, all pointed
to one thing. The revolution could only be accomplished
against the bourgeoisie. In a series of articles in which he
summed up the progress of events Marx concluded that the
alternative before Germany now was the counter-revolution of
feudal absolutism or the ‘social-republican revolution . 5
‘Social-republican , 5 was the term he used, not ‘Socialist 5 or
‘proletarian . 5 The seventeen points of the programme of the
Communist League had demanded a republic with social-
istic institutions, a Republic with equal suffagae for all,
which should free the peasants of all feudal burdens, assure the
workers a livelihood by national workshops, the breaking of
the power pi the aristocracy of finance for the benefit of
182 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
industry and the petty-bourgeoisie, a state bank to replace the
private banks and control credit. Social-republicanism in-
volved neither the abolition of private ownership of the means
of production nor the abolition of class-conflicts. It meant
capitalism still, but capitalism in a State in which workers,
petty-bourgeoisie and peasants had maximum concessions.
The social-republican revolution did not emancipate the
proletariat; it merely prepared the ground for the struggle for
its emancipation. If the bourgeoisie failed, if they did not
manage to attain what was expected of them, i.e. a constitu-
tional monarchy in theory but their own supremacy in fact,
the other anti-feudal classes must part from them and workers,
petty-bourgeoisie and peasants must advance for the social
republic.
From the autumn of 1848 onwards the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung started changing its tone. If previously it had only
paid slight attention to specifically working-class questions,
wishing to avoid anything tending to disturb harmonious
co-operation between bourgeoisie and proletariat against the
forces of absolutism, it now set itself to demonstrating the full
extent of the antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie.
It gave publicity to the work-book that the municipal authori-
ties of Cologne imposed on its workers, a shameless document
demonstrating the workers’ lack of rights. The Neue Rheinische
Zeitung declared that this was evidence of what kind of consti-
tution the German bourgeoisie would give the people if it came
into power.
The weakness of the German Revolution was now manifest.
Its most deep-seated cause lay in Germany’s defective economic
development. All the negative factors which had come to
light, the splitting up of the revolutionary movement in the
separate states, the weakness of the bourgeoisie, the inertia of
the petty-bourgeoisie, the uncertainty of the workers, all had
their deepest roots in it. After the collapse of Vienna and
Berlin, in the face of the growing apathy and paralysis which
seemed to be extending its grip from day to day, all hope that
the German revolution might once more find sufficient strength
within itself seemed to disappear. Towards the end of 1848
Marx rested all his hopes upon a blow from without. The Gallic
cock must crow again. The revolution in its course through
DEFEAT WITH HONOUR 183
Europe had started out from Paris, in Paris the counter-
revolution had gained its first victories, in Paris likewise it
would suffer its next defeat. Not a country in Europe now
lived its own life alone; the same battle-front ran through them
all. The Revolution could not conquer in any country unless
the counter-revolution were overthrown in France. The
article with which the JSfeue Rheinische Zeitmg greeted the
New Year ended with the words: ‘Revolutionary rising of the
French working class, world war, that is the programme for
i 8 4 9 -’
In the Revolution’s period of decline the respective social
forces stood out far more plainly than during its period of
advance. The strength and weakness of the various classes
were now apparent. The ultra-Lefts chose just this moment to
lose all sense of proportion. They clung the more fanatically
to their wish-picture the farther reality departed from it. At
the beginning of 1849 a fresh attack on Marx was hatched in
the Workers’ Union.
In spite of the unrelenting efforts of the public prosecutor,
supported by the partisan president of the court, to secure a
conviction of Gottschalk, ‘who appealed to the crude masses,
the lowest section of society, the most incapable of all of forming
an opinion,’ the jury had acquitted him. Marx’s acceptance
of the presidency of the Workers’ Union had only been pro-
visional. Now that Gottschalk was free once more, he was
able to resume it. But in the meantime a great deal had
changed in the Union, and Gottschalk’s long imprisonment had
not been without its effect on him. The school through which
the Union had passed in those stormy days under the leadership
of Marx and his friends had not been in vain. It had evolved,
its understanding of the course of development had become
infinitely clearer, it no longer only differentiated between black
and white, between heaven and hell as it had done in the past;
it had learned to differentiate both in the camp of the counter-
revolution and in its own, it no longer stood for all or
nothing.
Gottschalk was bitterly disappointed. ‘His’ Union, which
he regarded so tenderly as his own creation and believed he
could sway this way and that as if it were his own property,
had been stolen from him. He decided that it needed
184 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
reorganisation, and proposed that full powers be vested in the
president — that, of course, meant Gottschalk himself — to
appoint his own officers, for he alone possessed the necessary
knowledge, understanding and authority. The Union declined
to submit to a dictatorship of this sort, and Gottschalk was
enraged at its ‘ingratitude/ His vanity was so wounded that
at the beginning of January, 1849, he left Cologne without
saying anything to anybody and went to Brussels. But before
leaving he gained control of the Union newspaper, and the
new editor whom he put in charge was his unconditional ad-
herent, as he was destined soon to show by what he wrote
about the forthcoming elections.
Gottschalk may have asked the members of the Workers’
Union to put him up as candidate for the Prussian National
Assembly and they may have refused. This was later believed
to have been the chief reason for his departure from Cologne.
Gottschalk denied it, however, and recalled his attitude to the
elections of 1848, to participation in which he had been so
strongly opposed. But that had been in 1848. In 1849
Gottschalk became a candidate, though not in Cologne. He
stood in Bonn and also in a peasant constituency near Bonn,
on both occasions without success.
The elections, under the new Constitution granted by the
king, were due to take place on February 22, 1849. The
Workers’ Union spent weeks discussing whether to participate
in them or not. Anneke, who was a friend of Gottschalk,
though he did not remain a partisan of his to the end, was in
favour of the Workers’ Union putting up their own candidate.
Marx opposed this, in the first place for the practical reason
that the time till the election was too short to make the neces-
sary preparations. In principle, of course, he was in favour of
putting up workers’ candidates, but for the moment it was not
a question of ‘doing something on grounds of principle but of
creating opposition to the Government, to absolutism and to
feudal domination.’ He was far from agreeing on matters of
principle with Raveaux, whom he had relentlessly criticised,
and with Schneider, both of whom were standing as candidates.
But it was not a question of a struggle between ‘red’ and ‘pink’
Democrats now. ‘In view of the impossibility of putting one’s
own principles into effect it was necessary to^unite with the
DEFEAT WITH HONOUR 185
other opposition party in order not to leave the victory to
absolute monarchism. 5
This was another attempt to go part of the way with the
radical bourgeoisie. It was an attempt undertaken without
much hope of rallying the ranks in a battle that was almost
lost. Yet it was the only course open in Germany as long as a
blow did not come to clear the stifling atmosphere from with-
out. In this situation, with the forces distributed as they were,
anything else would have amounted to so much empty
verbiage.
The second Prussian National Assembly was also elected by
indirect voting. The primary voters elected the electors who
elected the actual deputies. The Left bloc were successful in
Cologne. Of the 344 electors two hundred were Democrats
and opponents of the Constitution the king had granted.
They sent two deputies to Berlin, Kyll and Schneider, the
lawyer, with whom Marx had worked for months in the
Democratic Union.
The majority of the members of the Workers 5 Union were
followers of Marx. Gottschalk’s closest followers, utterly
opposed to compromise as of old, clinging to their principles
all the more obstinately because they were utterly incapable of
practical political thinking, wrong even when an error in their
calculations accidentally produced the right result, now threw
all discretion to the winds and used their paper to attack Marx
more and more violently. Gottschalk still retained his control
of the Union paper, and the Union failed to regain it. Conse-
quently it was forced to start a new paper of its own. From
February onwards there were two workers’ newspapers in
Cologne, fighting each other hammer and tongs. Gottschalk’s
paper declared relentless warfare on ‘all parties, from that of
the JVeue Preussische fyitmg (the mouthpiece of the extreme
Right) to that of the Neue Rheinische £eitimg.’ In the issue of
February 25, 1849, there appeared an open letter ‘to Herr
Karl Marx/ which laid plain the substance of the dispute
between Gottschalk and him. It was not signed but was
written by Gottschalk, who remained behind the scenes but
took a very lively part in the sectional squabble as before.
Wounded pride was not the smallest of his motives. At the
Frankfurt democrats 5 Day Schapper had said that Marx was
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
1 86
destined to play a great role, and this had hurt him. He con-
soled himself with the thought that this Goliath must meet his
David too.
The ‘open letter 5 seized on an article of Marx’s in the Neue
Rheinische %eitung of January 21. Gottschalk chose well. Never
before and never again in the Neue Rheinische J^eitung did Marx
express with such clarity his interpretation of the tasks of the
revolution and tlie role played in it by the various classes.
The elections for the second Prussian National Assembly
were at hand. The bourgeoisie were prepared to put up with
the new constitution. Marx laid bare once more, in words
that were crystal-clear and were this time entirely lacking in
that scorn which he usually never spared, how inseparably their
interests were interwoven with this constitution. It was not a
question now of a Republic or even of a red Republic, but
simply of the old absolutism with its hierarchy on the one hand
and the representative system of the bourgeoisie on the other.
Prussia must either attain the political organisation correspond-
ing to the social conditions of the century or retain a political
constitution corresponding to the social conditions of the past.
The struggle against the bourgeois system of private property
could not yet be. It confronted England and was on the order
of the day in France. In Germany the struggle was rather
against a political system which threatened bourgeois private
property because it left the helm of the ship of state to the
representatives of feudal private property, to the king by the
grace of God, the army, the bureaucracy, the provincial
Junkers, and a number of finance barons who were their allies.
Marx then proceeded to demonstrate in detail how Prussian
feudalism had injured and was continuing to injure the
bourgeoisie, how it was restricting the development of modern
big industry, hampering foreign trade, delivering German
industry helpless into the hands of English competition. He
demonstrated how Prussian fiscal policy and the Prussian
bureaucratic machine had cut everything, great and small, to
the measure of the feudal classes. The class-interest of the
bourgeoisie was to destroy the feudal state themselves. That
was their historical task, and this revolution was their revolu-
tion.
What of the workers and the petty-bourgeoisie?% ‘We say to
DEFEAT WITH HONOUR
187
the workers and the petty-bourgeoisie: rather suffer in modern
bourgeois society, which by the development of industry creates
the material means for the foundation of a new society which
will free you all, than step backwards into an obsolete form of
society, which, under the pretext of saving your class, will
plunge the whole nation back into mediaeval barbarism. 5 1
In these words Marx expressed, brutally and without the
slightest regard for fondly nourished illusions, the fact that the
revolution, on whomsoever’s shoulders it might be borne, must
be the bourgeois revolution first and could be no other, because
it was necessary to free bourgeois conditions of property, i.e. in
later language, capitalist economy, from all the fetters that
hampered its development. The proletarian revolution would
only be possible after capitalist economy had created the
conditions that presupposed it.
Gottschalk’s reply to Marx was: ‘What is the purpose of such
a revolution? Why should we, men of the proletariat, spill our
blood for this? Must we really plunge voluntarily into the
purgatory of a decrepit capitalist domination to avoid a
mediaeval hell, as you, sir preacher, proclaim to us, in order
to attain from there the nebulous heaven of your Communist
creed? 5
It was the question that Weitling put, it was the question
that Willich and his supporters were to put a year later, it was
the question that Bakunin’s followers put in the seventies.
Every time the bourgeois revolution was on the order of the day
this question was put to scientific Socialism, expressing the
same impatience as that to which the London Communists
gave its classic formula in 1850 — ‘We must come into power
at once or lay ourselves down to sleep. 5
Gottschalk’s open letter also contained the reproach that
such ideas could only come from an intellectual. ‘They are
not in earnest about the salvation of the oppressed. The dis-
tress of the workers, the hunger of the poor have only a
scientific, doctrinaire interest for them. They are not touched
by that which stirs the heart of men. 5 Thus did Gottschalk,
himself an intellectual in the guise of a proletarian, make play
with the mistrust of intellectuals felt by many workers; as if
the threatened relapse into barbarism held terrors for Marx,
i.e. for aesthetes and cultivated minds, but not for the workers.
l88 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
No, said Gottschalk, the party of the revolutionary proletariat
knew no fear. He derided Marx for making the outbreak of
revolution in Germany dependent on an outbreak in France
and an outbreak in France dependent on an outbreak in
England. He maintained that the proletariat must carry out
its revolution here and now, without hesitations or misgivings.
The revolution must be permanent and must continue until
the victory of* the proletariat. It was obvious that, holding
these views as he did, Gottschalk was bound to reject co-
operation with the bourgeois Democrats even if they were not
(and this was another dig at Marx) such ‘weaklings and
nobodies’ as the Cologne deputies whom Marx had recom-
mended for election.
If Gottschalk expected Marx to continue the controversy he
was sadly disappointed. Marx ignored the attack. He had
succeeded in keeping his controversy with Weitling behind the
scenes and he did not engage in polemics ‘towards the Left’
this time either. Instead of indulging in a theoretical battle
with Gottschalk in a situation which demanded the concentra-
tion of all forces against the Right, instead of engaging in a
controversy that might easily be misconstrued and was in any
case inopportune, he preferred setting forth his own positive
point of view. Later, in a situation that was in many respects
similar, on the occasion of Lassalle’s agitation against the
Prussian Progressive Party, Marx adopted the same attitude.
But it was impossible for his comrades in the Workers’ Union
to keep silence. The breach between them and Gottschalk’s
followers was so great that the Union ended by splitting into
two. Gottschalk’s adherents resigned and formed their own
organisation. It only survived for a few months. A year later
the old Union also expired, shattered by the blows of the
Reaction.
After Gottschalk’s return to Cologne in the summer of 1849,
he took practically no more part in political activity. He
resumed his medical practice as a faithful and selfless helper
of the poor. Cholera broke out in the autumn, and Gottschalk,
actuated by the sympathy for the poor which was the whole
reason of his being, was the first and for a long time the only
doctor to work in the infected slum districts. He caught the
disease himself and died, after a day’s illness, o©. September 8,
DEFEAT WITH HONOUR l8g
1849. Many hundreds of workers followed their dead friend
to his grave.
In the struggle against the majority of the Workers 5 Union,
a substantial proportion of Gottschalk’s adherents had been
actuated by personal motives and emotional attachment to
their leader. Gottschalk had expressed, in however distorted
and mutilated a fashion, an under-current of feeling in the
revolutionary movement that grew stronger* and stronger as
time went on and affected even those who had hitherto followed
Marx in his policy of coalition with bourgeois democracy. The
same aspiration, to liberate the workers 5 movement from all
burdensome and oppressive ties, called the Communist League
into being once more.
Its old leaders, with Schapper and Moll at their head, had
never been entirely reconciled to the dissolution of the League,
although they had not been able to resist Marx’s arguments
for its dissolution. The branches of the League abroad had
never acknowledged its dissolution. At the second Demo-
cratic Congress in Berlin, Ewerbeck, leader of the Paris branch,
had conversations with former League members, with whom
he arranged to summon a general League Congress in Berlin
for December, 1848. The Congress was to appoint new
executive officers in place of those previously appointed by
Marx. The victory of Reaction in Berlin prevented the Con-
gress from taking place, but the will to revive the League was
there. Moll, who settled in London after fleeing from Cologne,
was particularly active in the matter. Members of the London
branch co-operated with him in drafting new League statutes.
Moll, Heinrich Bauer and Georg Eccarius were to be the
leaders of the resuscitated League.
At the beginning of 1849 Schapper was informed by Moll
of the London decision and invited to found a branch in
Cologne. Schapper summoned the old members of the
League and a few of the most active members of the Workers 5
Union and established a branch. Marx, Engels and the rest
of the editorial staff of the Neue Rheinische % eitung seem to have
been invited to join it in vain. A short time afterwards Moll
appeared surreptitiously in Cologne as the representative of
the new central office. He travelled all over Germany
establishing # contacts on behalf of the organisation. His
190 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
chief aim was to persuade Marx and Engels to rejoin the
League.
A meeting took place at the editorial offices of the Neue
Rheinische £eitung. Marx, Engels and Wilhelm Wolff were
present, besides Moll and members of the Cologne branch.
‘The discussion centred on whether the League ought to be
re-established or not, 5 one of those present at the meeting later
wrote. ‘Those who took part in the debate were chiefly Marx,
Engels and Wolff on the one side and Schapper and Moll on
the other. Marx declared once again that under existing
conditions, with freedom of speech and freedom of the Press,
the League was superfluous. Schapper and Moll, on the other
hand, insisted that the League was absolutely essential. Marx
and his colleagues also objected to the statutes that Moll
proposed.’ Marx’s objections were based on the League’s
proposed programme — its aims, as set forth in the statutes,
were not those of the Communists — as well as on its proposed
organisation, which ‘tended towards the conspiratorial.’ Marx
was supported by Engels and Wolff, besides a few members of
the Cologne branch, and Moll left Cologne without attaining
his object.
The freedom of speech and of the Press, which in Marx’s
opinion made the re-establishment of the League superfluous,
still existed, certainly, but they were increasingly menaced
every day. The Neue Rheinische Zjeitung had to defend itself
against more and more violent attacks. The officials whom it
so pitilessly criticised had harassed it with complaints ever
since the first day of its existence. They felt themselves
‘slandered’ every other minute. Among those who complained
were Drigalski, a high official named Zweiffel, a policeman,
and Hecker, the attorney-general. Some of their objections
were so absurd that they had obviously been inspired from
above. For instance, after Marx printed a republicam appeal
by the notorious Gustav Hecker, Hecker, the attorney-general,
protested at his not having pointed out that Gustav Hecker
was not the same man. He claimed that this omission might
possibly have led the reader to suppose that he, an official of
royal Prussia, was making a Republican appeal. Far more
serious was an accusation against Marx and his comrades
based on his appeal to the people to refuse to pay taxes.
DEFEAT WITH HONOUR I9I
At first the officials persecuted Marx with accusations which
they knew to be baseless obviously for the sole purpose of
temporarily silencing him by a longer or shorter period in
prison on remand. The Democrats of Cologne became alarmed
at the persecutory zeal of the courts. The workers had already
lost two presidents of their Union, and they were not minded
to permit a third to be incarcerated. In the middle of Novem-
ber, when Marx was asked to appear before The examining
magistrate on account of some trivial libel allegation, a large
crowd of workers gathered outside the court and refused to
disperse until Marx reappeared. They received him with
jubilation and he was forced to make a short speech, the only
one he ever made in the streets of Cologne. But there was
even greater indignation, to say nothing of very justified
anxiety, a week later when Marx and the other members of
the committee of the Democratic Union were ordered before
the court once more, this time for an alleged ‘treasonable’
appeal against a Government which was guilty of violating the
Constitution. Before the accused appeared before the examin-
ing magistrate, a special delegation insisted on a high adminis-
trative official assuring them that they would not be arrested.
The civil officials preserved at least the outward appearance
of legal forms. The military took more solid measures. The
Neue Rheinische Zeitung had by no means soft-pedalled its
exposures of the excesses committed by the soldiery at the
instigation of their officers, particularly during the period of
martial law. The officers, naturally enough, loathed the paper
and plied the War Ministry with appeals for the suppression
of the ‘pernicious rag.’ Threatening letters poured in by every
post. One day two non-commissioned officers presented
themselves at Marx’s private address and announced that the
newspaper had insulted the rank of non-commissioned officer
and made threats of violence against the editorial staff. ‘Marx
received them in his dressing-gown, with the butt of an un-
loaded revolver protruding from one of the pockets,’ Engels
relates. ‘This sight was sufficient to cause the gentlemen to
refrain from further parleying, and they withdrew meekly, in
spite of the fact that they were carrying their side-arms.’
These crude attempts at intimidation had no effect what-
ever. The civil authorities had no better success. In February,
192 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
1849, Marx twice appeared before a jury to answer their
accusations. On the first occasion he was accused of insulting
officials; on the second occasion the charge arose out of his
November tax-boycott appeals. The first charge was easy to
rebut, and the jury acquitted him after very short deliberation.
Marx took advantage of his second trial to make a brilliant
speech showing up the whole hypocrisy of the Reaction, who
themselves tofe the law to shreds and then, when men de-
nounced them and called for violence against them, they, the
law-breakers, accused them of violating the law. ‘When the
Crown makes a counter-revolution the people rightly reply
with a revolution.’ They could rid themselves of him as a
conquered enemy but they could not condemn him as a
criminal. The jury acquitted Marx once more, and, the
foreman thanked him, on behalf of his colleagues, for his
‘extremely informative speech.’
The courts having failed them, the now completely infuriated
officials were compelled to resort to other measures. A favour-
able opportunity appeared to present itself in March. Though
Joseph Moll had failed by a long way in attaining the objective
of his journey in Germany, he had succeeded in establishing
some connections and he had managed to found a branch in
Berlin. The police were very soon on its track, for there appear
to have been spies among its members. They did not know a
great deal, but they did know some things; the rest they
guessed or invented. At the end of March, 1849, police
conducted a number of house-searches, in the course of which
some papers fell into their hands, including the statutes drafted
by Moll. They also secured a clue which led them to suppose
that the headquarters of the secret organisation were in
Cologne. The police decided that the leaders must necessarily
be Engels, Gottschalk, Moll and Marx, who in turn took their
orders from a Paris committee of three, consisting of Herwegh,
Heinzen and Ewerbeck. Thus truth and falsehood were
inextricably mingled, partly in sheer defiance of common
sense, partly as a consequence of sheer ignorance. But a
sinister conspiracy had been discovered, the Fatherland was
in danger, and it was possible to act at last. A special com-
missioner travelled from Berlin to Cologne, entrusted with the
task of searching the houses of those implicated, confiscating
DEFEAT WITH HONOUR I93
their papers and issuing warrants for their arrest in accordance
with the result of his investigations. In addition the corre-
spondence of the conspirators was to be watched. The police
visualised their hated enemies as already in prisori. They
were bitterly disappointed. The Cologne authorities were
anxious ‘in all friendliness and willingness 5 to oblige the police,
but, in view of the mood of the city and the, complete un-
reliability of the assize courts, they were unwilling to risk
another fiasco. They would not even agree to a house-search
being undertaken without specific instructions from the higher
authorities in Berlin. So this step misfired as well.
The Rhineland was not Berlin, and the sympathies of the
overwhelming majority of the population on the Rhine were
to the Left. Steps the Reaction were able to take with impunity
elsewhere in Prussia had to be pondered well here. The
political situation became more strained every day. The new
Prussian National Assembly was far more radical than its
predecessor and its Left wing was stronger and more active.
The Democratic Party, under the leadership of D’Ester, of
Cologne, prepared an armed rising. During the Easter holi-
days deputies from various parts of Germany discussed common
action should that eventuality occur.
A ‘live 5 section of the bourgeoisie, especially the petty-bour-
geoisie, had roused themselves once more at the eleventh hour.
But it was a section only. The vast majority of the bourgeois
Democrats befuddled themselves with talk and nothing but
talk. The experiences of the past year had taught Marx that
when things grew serious they would cower by their firesides
just as timidly as they had done in September and November.
The republican question was discussed by the Cologne
Democratic Union. There were two long meetings at which
the question whether it should continue to call itself ‘Demo-
cratic 5 or ‘Democratic-Republican 5 was debated. It remained
faithful to the democratic title. But what had been good and
right in April, 1848, no longer sufficed in April, 1849. Accord-
ing to the Neue Kolnische fitting, which was edited by Anneke,
the Union was thus determined ‘to plunge deeper into the
wide waters of Democracy, which nowadays has quite taken
the place of Liberalism. 5 On April 14, Marx, Schapper,
Wilhelm WolfT and Anneke resigned from the Rhineland
194 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
sectional committee of the Democratic Union. Their reasons
were that the ‘present organisation of the Democratic Union
included too many heterogeneous elements to permit of
activity beneficial to the cause. 5 Three days later the Workers 5
Union decided to summon a Congress of all the Workers 5
Unions of the Rhine province and Westphalia and all other
organisations which acknowledged Social Democracy at
Cologne on May 6.
Thus was the separation between bourgeois and proletarian
democracy finally achieved. In August, 1848, Marx had been
in favour of a coalition of the ‘most heterogeneous 5 elements.
In April, 1849, parted from the Democrats because they
embraced too many heterogeneous elements. In 1848 he had
been in favour of a united front of all the anti-feudal classes;
now he directed that the alliance be dissolved. A cleavage
had become inevitable. The differences in equipment, tempo,
ilan y fighting spirit, between the various columns of the great
army which should have marched as a united front and with
a single objective against the forces of absolutism and com-
pelled the victory had become too great. A close connection
with bourgeois Democracy had been maintained as long as
possible, but it no longer worked, and it was necessary to
abandon it. That did not exclude the possibility of future
coalitions between the workers 5 unions and Democracy if
circumstances should demand it. In February Marx supported
the candidature of the Democrats, in April he parted from
them, in June he went to Paris as a representative of a Demo-
cratic committee.
Marx may have had an additional reason for deciding on a
public separation from the Democrats at that particular
moment. In the spring of 1849 the resurrected Communist
League was to all appearances still very weak. But it existed
nevertheless, and it was to be anticipated that it would soon
be of greater importance. The closer the counter-revolution
approached the greater would be the justification for its
existence. The workers had been only reluctant adherents of
the necessary but disagreeable alliance with the Democrats,
and the pick of them were obviously disposed to join the
League and thus sever all connection with the Democratic
Unions. Marx may well have foreseen the danger that, if he
DEFEAT WITH HONOUR 195
postponed parting from the Democrats too long, it might result
in isolating himself and his colleagues from the impatient
workers. When Marx rejoined the Communist League is not
known. It may have been at the time when he resigned from
the Democratic committee. The journey he started in the
middle of April may possibly have been a tour of organisation.
The immediate reason for it was, of course, the increasing
financial difficulties of the Neue Rheinische Z e ^ u ^i*
Its circulation increased from month to month, and it was
read all over Germany. But its difficulties were increased by
its very success. Printers, compositors, paper-makers, dispatch
clerks had to be paid in cash, and subscriptions flowed in
irregularly and belatedly. After the desertion of practically
all the shareholders no capital was left. The newspaper
swallowed up the remnants of Marx’s legacy and all his wife’s
capital. This staved off things for a short time, but in the
spring of 1849 the paper was once more on the brink of ruin.
Marx tried to raise money in Westphalia and the north-west
of Germany, but with little success. When he returned to
Cologne on May 9 he brought only three hundred thalers
with him.
Cologne was quiet, but in other Rhineland towns fighting
had begun. In May, 1849, the German Revolution flared up
for the last time. Dresden rose and fierce fighting raged in
the streets for four days. The revolutionaries — among whom
was the director of the Royal Saxon Orchestra, Richard
Wagner — were defeated, for the Prussian forces were over-
whelming. The Bavarian Palatinate was in wild insurrection.
Baden was in the hands of a revolutionary Democratic govern-
ment. In Rhenish Prussia the workers rose at Elberfeld,
Iserlohn and elsewhere. The Government’s military supre-
macy was so great and the few fighters were so pitifully left in
the lurch by the petty-bourgeoisie that the isolated outbreaks in
the Rhineland collapsed in a few days. This was also the fate
of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Even now the Government did not dare to ban the paper
outright. They still feared an open rising, though Cologne
teemed with soldiers. True to their nature, they adopted
crafty bureaucratic measures. They took no steps against the
paper, they ‘qply’ banished Marx. Marx having become an
196 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
‘alien 5 by reason of his loss of Prussian nationality, they had
the formal right to do so. He was a disturber of peace and
order, so he was desired to leave Prussia at short notice. Marx
received the expulsion order on May 16. On May 18 the last
number of the Neue Rheinische £eitung appeared, printed in red.
A prominent position was given to Freiligrath’s powerful
valedictory poem:
. . . Auf der Lippe den Trotz und den zuckenden Hohti ,
In der Hand den blitzenden Degen ,
Noch im Sterben rnfend: Die Rebellion!
So bin ich in Ehren erlegen. . . .
Nun Ade , nun Ade, du kampfende Welt ,
Nun Ade , ihr ringenden Heere!
Nun Ade , du pulvergeschwarztes Feld ,
Nun Ade , ihr Schwerter und Speer e!
Nun Ade , doch nicht fur immer Ade!
Denn sie toten den Geist nicht , ihr Druder!
Bald rich? ich mich rasselnd in die Iloh.
Bald kehr ich reisiger wieder ! 1
The last issue of the Neue Rheinische £eitung warned the
workers against any sort of rising. In view of the military
situation in Cologne they would have been irretrievably lost.
‘The Prussians will be infuriated by your quiet. In taking
their farewell the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung thank
you for the sympathy shown them. Their last word will always
and everywhere be: “The emancipation of the working class! 555
The Reaction were highly gratified at the disappearance of
the paper ‘with which the Moniteur of 1 793 paled in compari-
son. 5 ‘Its surviving friends will be incapable of rivalling their
Rhenish master in scurrility and desecration of the holiest in
mankind. 5 The attitude of the people of Cologne to its dis-
appearance is demonstrated by the words of a correspondent
who was anything but sympathetic: ‘No number of the Neue
Rheinische Z e ^ un S caused a greater sensation than the last. It
was printed in red from beginning to end. The rush at the
editorial offices and the demand for this number were really
1 Defiance and scorn quivering on my lips, the gleaming dagger in my hand,
still exclaiming: rebellion! in death, thus am I honourably defeated. Now fare-
well, farewell, you world of battle, farewell, you struggling hosts; farewell, you
powder-blackened fields, farewell, you swords and spears. Farewell, but not for
ever; for they cannot kill the spirit. Soon I shall once more be on high; soon I
shall return on a steed!
DEFEAT WITH HONOUR
197
extraordinary. About twenty thousand copies must have been
printed, and some of them are already fetching a thaler a
piece. Real idolatry was roused by the issue of May 18. One
hears again and again of instances of the paper being expen-
sively framed. 5
Marx liquidated the affairs of the newspaper with all speed.
He devoted the cash in hand, the proceeds of the sale of the
printing press (which belonged to him), etc., to pay the paper’s
debts. His own and his wife’s fortune had been swallowed up
to the last penny. Frau Marx had to pawn her silver to pay
for immediate necessities. The staff distributed themselves
among those parts of Germany where risings had, or had not
yet, taken place. Marx and Engels went south, to the area of
insurrection in the Palatinate of Baden.
Not that they expected a great deal from it. They had got
to know the nature of the petty-bourgeoisie, even the best and
most upright revolutionaries among them, and of the German
lower middle class in particular, too well to be able to have
great expectations. But even their most moderate expectations
were disappointed. Marx travelled by way of Frankfurt and
tried to persuade the Left representatives at the German
National Assembly to summon the revolutionary troops from
Baden and the Palatinate to Frankfurt by Parliamentary
decree. But that might perhaps have been falsely construed,
they held. No, no, even the Lefts intended to keep them-
selves ‘within the framework of the law. 5 It was no better in
areas where risings had taken place. Marx represented to the
leaders that if anything at all could save them it could only be
the most resolute offensive. They must promptly occupy
Frankfurt, place the National Assembly under their protection,
even if the Assembly did not explicitly ask for it, and so turn
the struggle into an all-German one, i.e. one of the National
Assembly against the reactionary governments. But the men
of Baden and the Palatinate did not look beyond Baden and
the Palatinate. They stayed where they were and there they
were crushed. The last rising of the German revolution, like
all the others, foundered on its local limitations.
In Germany there was no more work that Marx could do.
He was no soldier, and his place was not in the army. He went
to Paris as #ie representative of the Palatinate Democratic
I98 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
committee to get as much help for the insurrection as he could
from the French Democrats. Engels was unwilling to miss an
opportunity of gaining a little practical experience of war.
‘As after all it was necessary honoris causa that the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung be represented in the army of Baden and the Palatinate,
I girded on a sword to my side and went to Willich.’
Gottschalk’s followers warned the workers against taking up
arms. Their ultia-radicalism ended in a passivity which was
in fact counter-revolutionary. Their paper claimed that the
workers should quietly wait until the absolutists and the
constitutionalists had exhausted each other. The Commun-
ists, faithful to the words of the Manifesto which urged them
to support every revolutionary movement aimed at existing
social and political conditions, stepped without a moment’s
hesitation into the ranks of the insurrectionary army.
CHAPTER XV
THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE
The more desperate the situation in Germany became the
greater hopes did the revolutionaries entertain of France. Tn
France the battle will start again in the spring,’ Marx wrote
at the beginning of 1849. The ‘revolutionary volcano’ in
France seemed on the eve of an eruption, and it seemed to
him that its flames must inevitably overflow into Germany,
Austria and Hungary. The German counter-revolution could
only be, must only be an incident in the European revolution.
What did Baden and the Palatinate matter? If Paris rose the
whole of Europe would be in flames.
Marx went to Paris. But Paris viewed from within was
different from Paris viewed from without. Cholera was
rampant in the city. ‘The air was sultry,’ wrote Alexander
Herzen, the Russian revolutionary, who was in Paris at
the time. ‘A sunless heat oppressed mankind. Victims of
the contagion fell one after another. The terrified population,
and the procession of hearses dashing to the cemeteries as if they
were racing, seemed in keeping with events’ — i.e. the political
events of June, 1 849. The irony of history had once more placed
revolutionary warfare upon the order of the day, but it was
very different from what it had been a year before. At the
end of May an expeditionary force of the French Republican
Army, sent to Italy for the official purpose of defending Italy’s
freedom and independence, had stormed Rome, the last
stronghold of Italian liberty, and delivered its Republican
defenders into the hands of the Papal Inquisition. The
French Constitution still contained the fine phrase: * La
Republique frangaise rCemploie jamais ses forces contre la liberte
(Taucun peuple , n
On June 11, only a few days after Marx’s arrival in Paris,
Ledru-Rollin, leader of the Montagnards, proposed in the
Chamber that the President, Louis Bonaparte, and the cabinet
be arraigned for violation of the constitution. To quote
1 The Republic never employs its forces against the liberty of any people.
199
200
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
.Marx’s words in his Class Struggles in France , his words were
‘plain, blunt, unpretentious, matter-of-fact, pithy and power-
ful.’ The Chamber postponed the debate on this proposal,
but its fate was not destined to be settled in the Chamber.
In the evening a meeting took place between the leaders of
the Montagnards and the delegates of the workers’ secret
societies. Marx’s account of the meeting indicates that he
either was present himself or was given detailed information
by one of the principals at the meeting. He very successfully
fulfilled the task entrusted to him by the German Democrats,
namely that of making contact with the French revolutionaries.
There is some evidence that would seem to indicate that he
actually became a member of one of the secret Communist
organisations in Paris. As he wrote to Engels, he came into
contact with the whole of the revolutionary party and had
good grounds for hoping that within a few days he would have
every revolutionary journal in Paris at his disposal. But a week
later no revolutionary journals were left.
The Montagnards were not one whit behind the German
Parliamentarians of the ‘Left’ in indecision. They rejected
the proposal of the workers’ delegates that they should strike
that very night. True, the chances of a successful rising were
no longer very great, but the refusal to act cost the Monta-
gnards their last chance. For when they summoned a demon-
stration to the streets on June 13 the Government had long
completed its preparations. It was a simple matter for their
dragoons and riflemen to drive the unarmed masses from the
streets. Some of the Montagnard deputies were arrested,
others escaped. From that day on the National Assembly was
‘nothing but a committee of public safety of the Party of
Order.’
The last resistance of the revolutionaries in Central Europe
collapsed at the same time. In the Danube basin the army of
independent Hungary capitulated to the Russian troops,
which were far superior in numbers and equipment. Those of
its leaders who fell into the hands of the counter-revolution
were hanged. Those who managed to escape to Turkey lived
in fear of being handed over to the Austrian hangmen by the
Sublime Porte. In dismembered Germany the revolution died
piecemeal. Even to the very last everything was done to make
THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 201
the victory of the counter-revolution as easy as possible. The
risings in the spring of 1849 broke out one after another,
each outbreak coinciding with the suppression of its prede-
cessor. There was brave fighting in Dresden and on the
Rhine, and many hundreds, most of them workers, left their
lives on the barricades. The words ‘artisan, 5 ‘miner, 5 ‘day-
labourer, 5 etc., constantly recur in the lists of dead.
Many of them were members of the Communist League.
Only the extreme Left wing of the workers 5 movement, the
group that followed Gottschalk and Weitling, opposed the
rising. The organ of Gottschalk’s followers warned the
workers against participation in a movement which was not
the immediate concern of the proletariat but of the bourgeoisie.
This was but a consequence of an attitude which started out
from extreme revolutionism and necessarily ended in complete
passivity. Whatever their position may have been in 1848 and
1849, the overwhelming majority of the members of the League
flung themselves headlong into the struggle and fought to the
bitter end. Joseph Moll, who was unable to return to London
after his German journey, helped in the preparations for the
rising in Baden. With characteristic courage he even managed
to enlist in the insurrectionary army under the fire of the
Prussian guns. Then he went to Baden, where he fought
bravely and fell in the fighting on the Murg, shot in the head
by a Prussian bullet.
Engels took part in the campaign, first as a simple infantry-
man, later as an adjutant to Willich, who was in command of
a corps of volunteers. His was one of the best units of the
revolutionary army and consisted almost entirely of workers.
The sober, clear-thinking, sceptically inclined Engels entered
the struggle without any great expectations, for the weak sides
— and it had practically nothing but weak sides — of the whole
enterprise did not escape his keen intelligence; but he could
not deny himself the pleasure of heartily and unceremoniously
laughing at the mixture of excitement and alarm manifested
by the petty-bourgeois revolutionary statesmen. During the
course of the expedition he drew nearer to Willich, the ‘one
practical officer 5 who took part in it, and he praised him as
bold in action, cool-headed, clever and quick in decision.
Engels took pa»t in four engagements, two of which were fairly
202
KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
important. T have discovered,’ he wrote to Frau Marx soon
afterwards, fi that the much-lauded quality of impetuous
courage is one of the most ordinary properties that man can
have.’ He fought to the very end and marched into Swiss
territory with his corps, which was one of the very last units
of the revolutionary army to survive.
That was the end of the revolution of 1848, the beginning
of which had been so full of promise; moreover, it was the end
of the period of European history which culminated in it. But
those who had been in the thick of the fray did not believe it,
could not and would not believe it. The more fervently they
identified themselves with the world that had departed, that
world in comparison with which the new and greater world
which it had engendered dwindled practically into non-
existence in their eyes, the greater was their difficulty in acknow-
ledging the existence of the new. The whole thing could not be
over. To-morrow or the day after it would all break out again
and everything would be altered. He who in such a situation
thought anything else would have been no revolutionary. But
he who remained subject to this mood too long, unable to
shake it off and reconcile himself sternly to the fact that a new
historical epoch had begun, was no true revolutionary either.
Marx had battled so ardently that for a time he too was
subject to these inevitable illusions. He was dominated by
them for a whole year. A letter he wrote to Weydemeyer on
August 1, 1849, gives some clue to the extent to which his
analytical intelligence, generally so accurate, could err. Dis-
agreeable as the situation was at the moment, he belonged
nevertheless to those who were satisfaits. ‘ Les choses marchent
trfo bien , and the Waterloo of official Democracy is to be re-
garded as a victory. The governments by the grace of God
have taken over the task of revenging us on the bourgeoisie and
are chastising them for us.’
Marx searched for the weakest point in the enemy’s front.
England attracted his particular attention, and he began to
hope that the next blow might come from there, and that
England would be the scene of the ‘beginning of the next
dance.’ England seemed to him to be on the eve of a tre-
mendous economic crisis, and not long afterwards he confi-
dently predicted its outbreak for August, 1850*
THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 200
In spite of the hopes he had of England in the immediate
future he had no intention of going there. At the beginning of
July, 1849, his wife and children came to Paris. Marx rented
a small flat and settled down as if for a long stay. He was an
optimist. From June 13 the Reaction was the undisputed
master of Paris; and it was not to be expected that the police
would allow a man like Marx to remain completely unmolested
for long. *
The police devoted great attention to refugees from Ger-
many, who were said to be playing the leading part in an
‘international revolutionary committee 5 which did not exist
outside the police imagination. One prominent emigrS after
another was arrested and expelled. Marx’s turn was not long
postponed. His expulsion order was signed on July 19. Quite
possibly the police learnt of his presence in Paris from the
German Press, which was indulging at the time in ‘sketches
from emigrant life. 5 The police were not very well informed,
and some weeks passed before they discovered his address.
‘We stayed one month in Paris, 5 Frau Marx wrote in her
diary, ‘but we were not allowed to stay there long either. One
fine morning the familiar figure of a police-sergeant appeared,
to inform us that Karl et sa dame must leave Paris within
twenty-four hours. They were kind enough to offer us per-
mission to stay at Vannes, in Morbihan. 5
Frau Marx was expecting her fourth child and Marx was in
desperate financial straits. Morbihan was considered one of
the unhealthiest departments of France, the ‘Pontic Marshes 5
of Brittany. Banishment to such a place was ‘equivalent to a
disguised attempt at murder, 5 as Marx wrote to Engels. Marx
did not accept it. He tried hard to have the expulsion order
revoked, but in vain. He stated in an open letter to the
Press that he was staying in Paris purely for purposes of
scientific research. The only concession he obtained was a
respite for his wife. He had no choice but to leave France. If
he attempted to return to Belgium he was certain to be turned
back at the frontier. In Switzerland a regular hue-and-cry
after the German imigris was beginning, and England alone
remained. Marx crossed the Channel on August 24, 1849,
and his wife followed on September 15. Fate cast him into
the land in v^Jhich he believed the ‘next dance was going
204 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
to begin, 5 perhaps to cure him of his illusions the more
quickly.
When Marx came to England for the third time in his life
in the summer of 1849, he did not believe his visit would be
much longer than the two previous ones. It might last a few
weeks, possibly months, at the very most a year; but instead
of the short visit he anticipated, he spent the second half of
his life in England, which became his second home.
A great deal had changed in England since his last visit to
London two years before. The Chartist Movement had not
recovered from its serious defeat in April, 1848, and the whole
political landscape had undergone a profound alteration.
Marx nevertheless met some old acquaintances. The Fraternal
Democrats, at whose meeting on November 29, 1847, had
hailed the approaching revolution, still existed, and so did the
German Communist Workers 5 Educational Union, with whose
leaders Marx had discussed the programme and statutes of the
Communist League. Not a few of the old members had
answered the call of the revolution in their native land, but
many were too deeply rooted in England to be able to tear
themselves away. They had shared Germany’s hopes, exhilara-
tions and disappointments. The Union was the obvious centre
for the new refugees to gather in.
When Marx came to London very few of them had yet
arrived. But every Channel boat brought a fresh influx. At
first they were almost exclusively workers and artisans. The
‘great men of the emigration, 5 of whom Marx was destined to
have such unpleasant experiences, made their appearance
gradually. The refugees arrived in a state of pitiful distress.
Many had not a penny in their pockets. The continuation of
the crisis meant that even the most highly skilled workers had
difficulty in finding work, and often had to be content if the
pittance they could pick up as day-labourers sufficed to enable
them to stave off the pangs of hunger with a loaf of bread.
‘Many of these unfortunates, 5 a newspaper recorded, ‘consider
themselves fortunate in finding a job the nature of which makes
one recoil. The work is stamping raw pelts at a German fur
factory in East London. Imagine a big barrel in a very warm
room, filled to the very top with ermine and sable skins. A
man climbs into the barrel stark-nakdd and stajnps and works
THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 205
with his hands and feet from morning till night. The perspira-
tion pours from his body in streams. This soaks into the skins
and gives them their suppleness and durability, without which
they would be useless for more elegant purposes. Thus our
rich ladies, with their boas and muffs, though they do not
suspect it, are literally clothed in the sweat of the Democrats. 5
Most of them, however, could not even find work of this kind.
To help the hungry was the first and most important task.
Marx was among the founders of the London Assistance Com-
mittee. Similar relief societies came into being wherever
German refugees were gathered. The difference between the
London committee and the rest was that it was controlled by
Communists from the start. Of the five leading members three
were Communists, with Marx at their head. This was in
accordance with the social composition of the London refugees.
It was a period of wearing and exhausting work, involving
dozens of interviews every day, dashing from one end of
London to the other, collecting money and distributing it.
Marx had an enormous amount of work to do. He succeeded
in inducing the Fraternal Democrats to co-operate in the work
of relief, but the results were meagre. The total receipts of a
fund the Fraternal Democrats kept open for three months
amounted only to £1 14 s.
Marx’s active participation in the relief work was a matter
of course, but however urgent and necessary the work of relief
might be, to him political work in the Communist League was
incomparably more urgent.
The London branch, which Moll had used in his efforts to
resuscitate the League at the beginning of the year, had sur-
vived the revolution. The central office Marx found in
London was the only one that had any sort of contacts, though
not very close ones, with Germany and other refugee centres
abroad. Marx at once got in touch with the branch and soon
joined it. The central office was reorganised and completed
in the months that followed. Willich, who had come to
London with a recommendation from Engels, was at once
elected to the central office. Although Engels considered him
‘a “true” Socialist and a more or less tedious ideologist,’ he was
of the opinion that he would be useful at the central office.
Engels soon appeared *on the scene himself. Three of the
206 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
members — Heinrich Bauer, Eccarius and Pfander — survived
from the committee of November, 1847. A fourth, Schapper,
arrived in the summer of 1 850, and a number of new members
were elected as well. There were altogether ten members of
the central office in the summer of 1850, more than had ever
been known in the history of the League.
The election of Willich was the event that had the most
lasting consequences. He was a personal friend of Gottschalk
and shared many of his views, though he had not gone so far as
Gottschalk and Weitling in refusing to take part in the demo-
cratic insurrections. Willich was the representative of the
‘Left 5 wing of the Communist movement. Willich’s presence
at the central office was an indication of Marx’s and his friends 5
political compromise with the ‘Lefts. 5 This compromise was
the natural consequence of Marx’s new estimate of the Euro-
pean situation, of which mention has been made above. It
found its expression in the so-called first circular of the central
office of March, 1850, which was drafted by Marx and Engels.
Whether the document in all its details really represents
Marx’s ideas is difficult to decide. There is a good deal that
points to the fact that at this period Marx once more con-
sidered it necessary to warn his followers against extreme
maximalism. But in any case Marx believed that he could
achieve a compromise with the ‘Lefts’ on the basis of this
circular.
The document criticised Marx’s own tactics of 1848 and
1849, and in particular the decision to dissolve the League and
not put up workers’ candidates of their own. ‘A large number
of members who took part in the revolutionary movement
believed that the time for secret societies was past and that
activity in the open was adequate by itself. . . . While the
organisation of the Democratic Party in Germany, the party
of the petty-bourgeoisie, constantly improved, the working class
lost its one firm hold, remained at best organised for purely
local aims in single localities and thus came completely under
the domination and leadership of the petty-bourgeois Demo-
crats in the general movement.’ In these phrases Marx and
Engels criticised themselves and admitted to the ‘Lefts’ that
they had been wrong on a very definite issue.
But the point of the document lay not in jfs liquidation
THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 207
of the past but in its statement of the movement’s future
tasks.
The fundamental assumption, on which all the rest de-
pended, was the firm expectation of a new revolutionary out-
break in the immediate future. Marx, while engaged in draft-
ing this document, was also busy writing the article in which
he prophesied that there would be a crisis in England in
August, 1850, a crisis with which the renewal of the revolution
would coincide. He assured Engels that the English would
take it up just at the point at which the February revolution
had interrupted it. And in France and Germany it could not
be otherwise. In England and France the proletariat would
be engaged in the direct struggle for the state power. In
Germany the revolution had suffered a defeat. The bourgeoisie
had been forced once more to relinquish the power to the party
of feudal absolutism, but ‘all the same they had assured the
conditions which meant in the long run that, because of the
Government’s financial embarrassments, the power would fall
into their hands and all their interests would be safeguarded;
it was possible that from now on the revolutionary movement
might assume a so-called peaceful development.’ The bour-
geoisie had ceased to play a revolutionary role. Only two
revolutionary classes were now left in Germany; the petty-
bourgeoisie and the proletariat. There was not the least doubt
that there would be a moment in the further development of
the revolution when petty-bourgeois democracy would have the
predominant influence in Germany. It was therefore impera-
tive that the relations of the proletariat with this petty-bourgeois
democracy be accurately determined. They must strive for a
democratic state, whether it be constitutional or republican,
which would give them and their allies, the peasants, the
majority. They must fight for a change in social conditions
which would render the existing state of society as tolerable
and as comfortable as possible for the petty-bourgeoisie. But
democracy was far from being disposed to revolutionise the
whole of society for the benefit of the revolutionary proletariat.
Therefore the proletariat must rise together with the petty-
bourgeoisie, but it must not for one moment forget the treacher-
ous role which democracy would continue to play in the future.
‘While the democratic petty-bourgeoisie will be inclined to
208 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
bringing the revolution to as speedy a conclusion as possible,
it is our interest and our duty to make the revolution perma-
nent, until all the more or less possessing classes are forced
from power, the state-power is seized by the proletariat and
the partnership of the proletarians of the world has advanced
to such an extent that competition between the proletariats
has ceased, not j,ust in one country but in all the principal
countries of the world, and at least the vital forces of production
are concentrated in the hands of the proletariat. 5
In the forthcoming German revolution the proletariat must
in all circumstances preserve the independence of their
organisations. ‘Next to the new official government they must
set up their own revolutionary workers 5 governments, whether
in the form of local committees, branch councils, workers 5
clubs or workers 5 committees, so that the bourgeois democratic
government not only be promptly deprived of the workers 5
support but also be supervised and threatened from the very
outset by organisations which have the whole mass of workers
behind them. 5 The immediate consequence of the downfall of
existing governments would be the election of a National
Assembly. The proletariat — here once more the criticism of
Marx’s own activities in 1848 and 1849 particularly signifi-
cant — must see to it that ‘workers 5 candidates are put up every-
where beside the democratic candidates, even where they have
no prospect whatever of being elected. The progress which
the proletarian party is bound to make by coming forward
independently in this way is infinitely more important than the
disadvantage of a few reactionaries being elected. 5
Henceforward the necessity of establishing contacts with
related revolutionary parties in England and France was
urgent. The Fraternal Democrats were an open propaganda
society, they were capable of doing something in the way of
putting workers 5 educational unions in touch with one another,
but they were not adequate to the new tasks of the times. It
was necessary to create an association of secret societies for
simultaneous action in the revolution which might break out
any day. The circular was issued to the branches of the
League in March 1850, and an international militant alliance
was formed in April. It was called the ‘ Societe Universelle des
Communistes Revolutionnaires . 5 Its statutes bore the? signatures of
THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 20g
Vidil and Adam, representing the London Blanquist ‘emigrant’
organisations, Marx, Engels and Willich representing the
Communist League and Harney representing the Chartists.
These six men also constituted the central committee of the
new society.
Their programme and organisational structure are of great
interest. ‘ Le but de V association paragraph one of the statutes
reads, 'est la decheance de toutes les classes priviligiees de soumettre
ces classes a la dictature des proletaires en maintenant la revolution en
permanence jusqu'd la realisation du communisme , qui doit itre la
derniere forme de constitution de la famille humaine ' 1
This goal, to which the members of the association swore an
oath of loyalty, was to be attained by des liens de solidarity entre
toutes les fractions du parti communiste revolutionnaire en faisant dis -
paraitre conformement au principe de la fraternite republicaine les
divisions de nationality .’ 2
The rank and file of the secret societies did not themselves
become members of this secret society, which was restricted to
their leaders. Thus it was a secret society of higher degree.
An essential feature of this organisation was that it should not
come out into the open. What appears to be an allusion to it
is the statement in the second circular, issued by the central
office in June, 1850, to the effect that delegates of the secret
Blanquist societies were in permanent contact with the dele-
gates of the League and that the League delegates had been
entrusted by the Blanquists with important preparatory work
in connection with the next French revolution. Who these
delegates were and the nature of their duties is unknown. But
what the Blanquists were occupied with during the years 1850
and 1851 is known. They were engaged in preparations for
an armed rising, just as they had been before 1848 and just as
they continued to be afterwards. They were engaged in
plotting, devising schemes to gain the political power by simple
surprise attacks. Their confident assumption was that a com-
paratively small number of resolute, well-organised men, given
1 The aim of the association is to make an end of the privileged classes, to
submit these classes to the dictatorship of the proletariat by maintaining a per-
manent revolution until the realisation of Communism, which shall be the last
form of constitution of the human family.
2 Bonds of solidarity between all sections of the revolutionary Communist Party
by breaking down the barriers of nationality in conformity with the principle of
republican fraternjly.
14
210
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
a favourable moment, would be capable not only of seizing
the rudder of the ship of state, but, by the exercise of great and
unflinching energy, of maintaining their position until such
time as they had brought over the whole of the people to the
revolution and caused them to adhere to the small leading
group. The fact that Marx accepted this kind of revolution-
ism, which he condemned so violently both before and after-
wards, and was so utterly foreign in every way to the essential
nature of the proletarian revolution, the fact that he formed an
alliance with the Blanquists, proves better than anything else
the extent to which his judgment had been affected by the
breakdown of his immeasurable hopes. In later years Marx by
no means excluded co-operation with the Blanquists as a
matter of principle to be adhered to rigidly in all circumstances.
However violently he was opposed to their methods, he valued
their determination highly. But after 1851 it would have been
inconceivable for him to have encouraged the members of any
organisation which he led to join a Blanquist group. It should
be observed, however, that the rules of the super-secret society
assured the existence of the Communist League and — a highly
important consideration in Marx’s eyes — preserved it from the
danger of being outvoted by the other organisations. A two-
thirds majority was needed to pass a resolution and new
members could only be elected unanimously.
However greatly Marx’s outlook as indicated in the first
circular differed from his attitude in 1848 and 1849, the same
fundamental ideas were at the heart of both. Sooner or later
these ideas were bound to part him from the ultra-Lefts again.
Marx was in the first place convinced that the development of
the revolution in one country was closely bound up with its
development in all other countries; in the second place he was
convinced that the revolution had quite definite phases to go
through and that the various classes must necessarily come into
power in a definite order conditioned by economic facts. It
was at these points in the Marxian doctrine that Gottschalk
had directed the spearhead of his attack. Gottschalk had
criticised Marx for the ‘heartlessness’ with which he asked the
workers to ‘wait,’ for his ‘deviation’ from action in his own
country by referring to the coming revolution in France,
England, etc. Marx still firmly maintained that die democratic
THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 211
pctty-bourgeoisie must become the ruling class before the
proletariat could follow in its shoes. He yielded to his former
opponents, now his colleagues, in their estimate of the time
that must intervene. In Cologne he had talked of decades,
but now the process of development seemed concentrated into
an incomparably briefer period, though he still avoided
defining it more closely than that.
Marx was in error . He had impatiently anticipated a pro-
cess of development. He leapt across the years — and who at
that time would not have wished to have done so? But in
his fundamental attitude to the revolutionary process he took
back nothing of what he had maintained in 1848 and 1849.
If the new revolution was at hand the Communist League
must do everything in its power to be forearmed, Marx was
intensely active in the spring and summer of 1850. Heinrich
Bauer was sent to Germany as an emissary and had a successful
journey through North Germany, Saxony, Wurttemberg and
the Rhineland. Bauer was a skilful organiser and an excellent
judge of men, and he was able to bring once more into the
League organisation ex-members who had either lapsed into
inactivity or started working independently on their own. In
the summer of 1850 the League had as many as thirty branches.
Karl Schurz, the subsequent American statesman, who was
travelling in Germany at the time on behalf of a democratic
organisation founded in Switzerland for the purpose of reviving
broken contacts, was forced to admit that ‘all the usable forces
were already in the hands of the Communist League.’
The League was far bigger, stronger and better organised
than at the time of the revolution of 1848. The revolution had
come too soon for it, but the next revolution, contrary to
expectations, seemed to be tarrying. Marx was convinced that
an economic crisis was due in the autumn of 1850. But
summer passed and autumn came and the crisis failed to
appear. There was not even the slightest indication of its
approach. In June Marx obtained admission to the Reading
Room of the British Museum and made an intense study of the
economic history of the past decade, and the economic history
of Eng land in part icular. His notebooks of this period are full
of long columns of figures, tables, statistical information of
every kind. The more Marx mastered his material, the more
212 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
plainly did he see the vanity of his hopes. Europe was not on
the verge of a crisis but on the threshold of a new era of pros-
perity. ‘To him who had eyes to see and used them,’ Engels
wrote later, ‘it was obvious that the revolutionary storm of
1848 was gradually dying away.*
At the beginning of 1850 Marx once more had his own
paper. He had a great deal of difficulty in raising the money
for it, in spite of the help of Engels and friends in Germany.
‘The Neue Rheinische %eitung, a politico-economic review, edited
by Karl Marx,’ appeared in Hamburg in February, 1850. It
started as a monthly, but was intended to develop as soon as
possible into a fortnightly or if possible a weekly, so that as
soon as conditions permitted a return to Germany, it could
promptly emerge as a daily again.
The first three numbers contained Engels’s description of the
rising in the Palatinate of Baden, as well as Marx’s analysis of
the revolution in France from February, 1848, to November,
1849. Marx ended his survey with an estimate of the prospects
of the imminent revolution: ‘The result (of Bonaparte’s fight
with the Party of Order) is postponed, the status quo is upheld,
one section of the Party of Order is compromised, weakened,
made impossible by the other, and repression of the common
enemy, the great mass of the nation, is extended and stretched
to the breaking-point, at which economic conditions will once
more have reached the point of development at which a new
explosion will blow the whole of these quarrelsome parties into
the air, together with their constitutional republic.’
The last double number of the review’ appeared at the end
of November. Marx summarised the result of his studies as
follows: ‘In view of this general prosperity, in which the pro-
ductive forces of bourgeois society are flourishing as exuberantly
as they possibly can under bourgeois conditions, there can be
no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible
at periods when the two factors, modern forces of production
and bourgeois forms of production, come into conflict. The
incessant squabbles in which the representatives of the indi-
vidual fractions of the continental Party of Order are now
indulging and compromising one another are remote from pro-
viding an opportunity for a new revolution. On the contrary,
they are only possible because conditions for the time being
THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 213
are so secure and — what the Reaction does not know — so
bourgeois. All attempts of the Reaction to put a stop to bour-
geois development will recoil upon themselves as certainly as all
the moral indignation and enthusiastic proclamations of the
Democrats. A new revolution is only possible as the result of
a new crisis. But it is just as inevitable as a new crisis.’
To have clung any longer to a policy which had been correct
as long as a crisis and with it a revolution had Seemed imminent
would have meant being guided by ‘sheer wish’ instead of by
‘real circumstances.’ At first it was by no means easy for Marx
to reconcile himself to acknowledging that the years that
followed would belong to the bourgeoisie. Willich and his
supporters simply ignored the altered situation. In their view
real circumstances might be what they would. If they were
adverse, all that was required was the will to change them.
Willich’s immediate reaction to Marx’s analysis of the class-
struggle, of the position of the classes in the revolution, and of
the necessary phases of the revolution was that it was nothing
but a lot of intellectual theorising. He felt Marx’s view of
historical development was false. That the classes — capitalists,
middle class and proletariat — that is to say the victory of their
class-interests — must necessarily follow one another in succes-
sion seemed to him entirely absurd. He hated the middle
classes and shrank from the thought that the petty-bourgeoisie
would ever rule in Germany. They would smash all the big
factories and there would be ‘a hue-and-cry after the loot and
a demoralisation that would be all the greater the more
proletarians managed to grab a share of it for themselves.’
Willich only admitted the existence of two social classes. One
was opposed to oppression of every kind, whether on ideal or
practical grounds. The other was the class of the selfish
oppressors. With men of the first class he was convinced the
proletariat could work together towards bringing about the
downfall of the political powers-that-be. By these men the
proletariat would not be betrayed.
From this simplified view of society he deduced practical
consequences. Just as at night all cats are grey, political exiles
are always inclined completely to deny the very power which
has driven them abroad. The German exiles of the fifties were
no exception. 3 Practically all of them accused their enemies of
214 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
‘every kind of oppression’ and were, at least according to their
words, determined to struggle relentlessly against their oppres-
sors. Willich found in them the colleagues he sought, not just
as companions for a portion of the way, as the Democrats had
been for Marx in 1848 and 1849, but as comrades in the
activity he was pining for. The only form this activity could
take was that of conspiracy. He hatched every conceivable
kind of plot with* every conceivable clique of exiles. As Marx
later wrote, Willich and his friends demanded, ‘if not real con-
spiracies, at least the appearance of conspiracies, and hence
direct alliance with the Democratic heroes of the day.’ The
more such alliances with other groups of exiles led to adven-
turous conspiracies the more violently Marx repudiated them.
Marx had become associated with some conspirators him-
self, the Blanquists. But in France conspiracy had a historical
tradition. It had become an essential part of the revolutionary
movement and it had to be reckoned with. Marx knew its
negative sides only too well. He signed an agreement with the
Blanquists in April and the JVeue Rheinische Zeitmg-RwM
appeared in the same month, with book-reviews by A. Chenu
and Lucien de la Hodde. Marx’s judgment of the professional
conspirators was annihilating. ‘To begin with their social
position conditions their social character,’ he wrote. ‘Prole-
tarian conspiracy, of course, offers them only a very limited and
uncertain means of existence. They are therefore perpetually
forced to lay their hands on the conspiratorial purse-strings.
Many of them, of course, fall foul of bourgeois society and make
more or less of a good show in the police-courts. ... It goes
without saying that these conspirators by no means confine
themselves to organising the revolutionary proletariat. Their
business consists in forestalling the process of revolutionary
development, spurring it on to artificial crises, making revolu-
tions extempore without the conditions for revolution. For
them the only condition required for the revolution is a
sufficient organisation of their own conspiracy. They are the
alchemists of the revolution, and they share in every way the
limitations and fixed ideas of the alchemists of old. . . . The
police tolerate the conspiracies, not merely as a necessary evil.
They tolerate them as centres, easy to keep under supervision,
uniting the most powerful revolutionary social elements, as
THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 215
workshops of insurrection, which in France have become just
as necessary a means of government as the police itself, and
finally as recruiting grounds for their own political spies. . . .
Espionage is one of the chief occupations of the conspirator.
No wonder, therefore, that the small jump from routine
conspirator to paid police spy is made so frequently, encouraged
as it is by distress and imprisonment, threats and promises.
Hence the huge ramifications of suspicion within these organisa-
tions, suspicion which so blinds its members that they end by
taking the best among their colleagues for spies and accept the
real spies as reliable men. 5
The conspirator, Marx continues, busy with his scheming
and plotting and having no other aim before his eyes but that
of the immediate downfall of the existing regime, has the most
profound contempt for the theoretical enlightenment of the
workers concerning their class-interests. At a moment when,
in their opinion, it behoved every revolutionary to act, i.e. plot
and prepare risings, Willich and his followers certainly regarded
the lectures Marx delivered to the workers as a senseless waste
of time. Wilhelm Liebknecht, who had come to London in
the summer of 1850 and attached himself to Marx, writes
vividly of Marx’s lectures in his memoirs.
Tn 1850 and 1851 Marx gave a course of lectures on political
economy,’ he says. ‘He had been very unwilling to give them,
but after addressing a small circle of friends a few times he
allowed himself to be persuaded by us to address a larger
audience. In this course . . . Marx laid bare all the broad
outlines of the system which lies before us in Das Kapital. In
the hall of the Communist Workers’ Educational Union, which
was full to overflowing . . . Marx manifested a remarkable
talent for popularisation. No one hated the vulgarising, the
devitalising, the falsifying, the watering down of science more
than he, but no one possessed in a higher degree the capacity
for clear exposition. Clarity of speech is the result of clarity of
thought. Clear thought demands a clear form of expression.
‘Marx’s method was methodical. He would lay down a
proposition as briefly as possible, and then elucidate it at
greater length, taking extreme care to avoid using expressions
unintelligible to the workers. Then he would invite questions
from his audymee. Should there be none, he would subject
2l6
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
them to an examination, exhibiting such pedagogic skill that
no loopholes or misunderstandings escaped. . . . Marx had
the qualifications of a first-class teacher. 5
Liebknecht only heard the lectures on economics. Marx also
dealt with other questions, more concrete ones, dealing with
the situation as it had developed in the Communist League.
In a letter he wrote in July, 1850, to P. G. Roser, a member of
the League in Cdlogne, Marx mentions that he lectured on the
Communist Manifesto at the London Workers 5 Union in the
winter of 1849-50. Roser remembered the details of this
letter four years later. In the course of an interrogation by
the police Roser said that Marx demonstrated in these lectures
that Communism could not be attained for a good many years
yet, that Communism itself would have to go through a number
of phases and that it could not be attained at all except by the
way of education and gradual development. But Willich
opposed him violently with his ‘rubbish, 5 as Marx called it,
and said that Communism must be introduced by the next
revolution, if necessary by the power of the guillotine. Marx
was afraid that the idea of advancing at the head of his bold
Palatinate troops and imposing Communism by force, if neces-
sary against the will of the whole of Germany, had become so
firmly rooted in ‘General 5 Willich’s head that it would lead to
a split in the Communist League.
Every word of this letter, which Roser repeated from
memory, need not be weighed too carefully in the balance.
But it throws light once more on the conflict between Marx
and Willich. Marx assigned the Communist League one task,
the task of propaganda. He repudiated conspiracy, rash ad-
venture, insurrection. All Willich 5 s meditations and aspira-
tions were concentrated on insurrection. Marx saw in
revolution a historical process as the result of which the
proletariat could only seize the power after passing through
quite definite phases, which could not possibly be skipped.
Willich’s attitude was: now or never. In all essentials Marx
returned to his views of 1848 and 1849. One thing he stood
out for, now and in the future — the absolute necessity of an
independent party.
Willich regarded the theoretical discussions in the Com-
munist League with contempt. He considered ^imself ‘a man
THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 217
of action/ and when he started to act Marx was forced to break
with him. The danger that Willich might involve the Com-
munist League in his insurrectionary adventures had become
too great.
The situation in the League was a complicated one. Marx
had a majority at the central office. Of the four members who
had been elected at the Communist Congress of November,
1847, three, Heinrich Bauer, Pfander and Ecchrius, supported
Marx. The minority supported Willich, Schapper alone of
the ‘old 5 members of the central office among them. But
Willich had a majority in the London branch, as well as in
the London Workers 5 Educational Union. There were several
reasons for this. Willich’s crude revolutionism was bound to
appeal to the hungry, desperate workers assembled in both
organisations. Moreover, Willich was closer to them as a man.
While Marx, ‘scholar 5 and ‘theorist, 5 lived his own life and
only came to the Union to lecture, Willich, who had no family,
shared in the joys and sorrows of the exiled proletarians.
He had created co-operative society and lived with the
workers, ate with them and addressed them all in the familiar
second person singular; Marx was respected but Willich was
popular.
Marx proposed to the members of the central office that the
headquarters of the League be transferred to Germany and
that the central office transfer its authority to the central office
at Cologne, the headquarters of the most important branch of
the League, both by reason of its activity and its numerical
strength. Marx’s majority at the central office accepted his
proposal, which was viewed with favour at Cologne. Willich’s
minority declared it to be contrary to the statutes and founded
a new central office of its own. Part of Marx’s speech is
recorded in the minutes of the meeting at which the decision
was made. Tn place of a critical attitude the minority set
up a dogmatic one, 5 he said, ‘in place of a materialistic attitude
an idealistic one. They make sheer will instead of real con-
ditions the driving-wheel of the revolution. While we say to the
workers: you have fifteen or twenty or fifty years of bourgeois
and national wars to go through, not just to alter conditions
but to alter yourselves and qualify for political power — you on
the contrary s^y: we must obtain the power at once or we
218 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
might as well lay ourselves down to sleep. While we specifically
draw the German workers* attention to the undeveloped state
of the German proletariat, you outrageously flatter the national
sentiment and social prejudices of the German artisan, a course
which, of course, is far more popular. Just as the Democrats
make a sacred entity of the word “people,** so do you do the
same with the word “proletariat.** * The meeting took place
on September 15, 1850. Willich believed that the revolution
would break out at any moment, and went on believing it even
when the crisis, and with it the basis for the revolution, came
to an end. On September 6 the Bank of England met bank-
notes with gold for the first time for a long period. The crisis
was over.
The split in the League took place just in time, for Willich
plunged into activities that were henceforward entirely
quixotic. He was positive that things were going to happen
quite soon, and sent offletter after letter to Germany. He had
high hopes of the Cologne branch, whom he believed to be on
his side, or at least hoped to bring over to his side. A conflict
between Prussia and Austria was threatening, and the reserves
had been called up. Willich believed the Communists should
take advantage of the opportunity to seize Cologne, confiscate
all private property, ban all newspapers but one, and establish
a dictatorship. Thereupon he, Willich, would arrive and
march to Paris at the head of the revolutionary troops, turn
Louis Napoleon out, and promptly return to Germany to pro-
claim a one and indivisible republic, etc. He circulated his
crack-brained appeals to his followers, but fortunately no one
took any notice of them. The Cologne branch did everything
in its power to counteract all such wildcat schemes.
Three weeks after severing connection with Willich, Marx
liquidated the Society Universelle. Nothing is known of the
activities of this organisation, and it is doubtful if it was ever
really active at all. The Blanquists had set up a fencing and
shooting establishment in London, obviously intended for
training and preparing plotters for a rising. Liebknecht re-
lates that Marx went there to practise shooting and fencing,
not so much with the aim of leading an attack on the Paris
Hotel-de-Ville within the next few weeks as in memory of his
year at the university of Bonn. When the Blanquists invited
THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 2ig
Marx and Engels to a joint discussion with Willich of questions
arising out of the Societe Universelle, the answer given them
was that Marx and his friends regarded the society as long
since dead. From that time onwards the London Blanquists
had the most intense hatred for Marx, and one of them, the
adventurous Barthelcmy, described Marx as a traitor, and
‘traitors deserved death. 5 But the quarrel did not go farther
than words.
The London Communists who stood by Marx after the split
in the League were fairly regular at first in their attend-
ance at the weekly meetings, but gradually started dropping
out. Marx’s own attendances became more and more in-
frequent. ‘The public isolation in which you and I now find
ourselves pleases me very much, 5 Marx wrote to Engels in
February, 1854. ‘It is entirely in accordance with our
position and our principles. The system of mutual conces-
sions and compromises, which one had to put up with for
decency’s sake, and the duty of bearing one’s share of ridicule
in common with all the other asses of the party has now
ceased. 5 Marx had joined the revived Communist League on
the assumption of the imminence of a new revolutionary out-
break, which made the League, with its secret organisations,
its branches, emissaries and circulars, necessary, as it had been
before 1848. The assumption had turned out to be false, and
the League had lost the reason for its existence. There was no
longer any necessity to make concessions to the Blanquists,
compromises had become superfluous, the League itself had
become superfluous. Soon after the rupture with Willich, and
as soon as the danger of Willich’s stirring up the branches in
Germany to senseless insurrection had been eliminated, or at
any rate notably diminished, Marx ‘postponed’ his further
activities in the League ‘indefinitely.’ He only had occasion
to busy himself with League affairs once more, but the occasion
was a highly important one. It arose out of the trial of the
leaders of the Cologne branch.
The Communists in Cologne, which was now the centre of
the movement in Germany, had little experience of illegal
work, and they worked with incredible carelessness, sometimes
to the point of naivetL The Prussian police were not very
clever either. They themselves did not get on to the track of
220
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
the ‘conspirators,’ but had to be given a fillip from outside.
In May, 1851, the Saxon police arrested an emissary of the
League, a tailor named Nothjung, in Leipzig, and discovered
from his papers the existence of the organisation in Cologne
and the names of its most important members. The Prussian
police took no steps whatever until practically the whole of
the essential facts had been communicated to them. What
they lacked in professional skill they made up for by
brutal treatment of prisoners under arrest and shameless
provocation.
The genuine documents which came to light in the course of
the house-searches in Cologne were quite sufficient to bring
the members of the Cologne branch before a court of justice.
But under the Code Napoleon , which was in force in the Rhine-
land, the accused would have to appear before a jury, and
police and public prosecutor, not without reason in view of
past experience, feared that the accused, charged as they were
with activity as part of an organisation which stood for Marx’s
point of view and was concerned with propaganda, might be
acquitted. Therefore more substantial material must be pro-
duced. If there were none, it was necessary to create it. The
authorities were aware of the existence of Willich’s crack-
brained letters to the Cologne Communists, and although the
Cologne branch had specifically repudiated his plans for an
insurrection, their repudiation made no difference. According
to the police, they and Willich were all the same, and no
distinctions were recognised. In the eyes of the police no such
thing as a rupture because of fundamental political differences
existed. Willich and Marx were the same, and the quarrel
between them was a purely personal one, arising out of rivalry
for the leadership of the secret society. The police made
promises to all sorts of people, including convicts and prisoners
on remand. They promised them every sort of favour — with-
drawal of proceedings against them, quashing of their con-
victions — if they would agree to give suitable evidence. Not
content with that, they sought for documents — evidence in
writing that would compromise Marx and implicate him
personally.
The Cologne police even spread their net to London, where
most of the better-known refugees, above all thf leaders of the
THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 221
‘Marx Party/ and the ‘Willich Party’ were living. An army
of spies was set to watch the political refugees. The Germans
were trailed not only by the police agents of Austria, Prussia
and other German states but also by French spies, Belgian
spies, Dutch spies and Danish spies. A regular trade in infor-
mation about the German refugees sprang up, with a veritable
market at which information was bartered or paid for in cash.
Information was anxiously sought by diplomats, who used it
to curry favour with the German potentates, and the agents
formed rings or engaged in fierce competition with each other.
It was a dirty and lucrative business.
In many reports Marx appeared as a desperate terrorist
who used London as a base for organising attempts on the
crowned heads of Europe. The Prussian ambassador in
Brussels reported in December, 1848, that there were rumours
in Belgium that Marx was preparing an attempt on the King of
Prussia. Consequently, when a good royalist non-commissioned
officer made an attempt on the life of Frederick William IV
in the spring of 1850, special agents were sent to London who
naturally confirmed the fact that Marx was the organiser
of the outrage. The chief of the Belgian police passed on to
the Prussians his own agents’ report that Marx forgathered
every evening at a tavern with a group of desperadoes, to whom
he made inflammatory speeches — HI endoctrine ses seides qu'il
compte lacker un jour individuellement en Allemagne avec une mission
determinee facile d deviner .’ 1
The police also discovered that Marx, not satisfied with the
assassination of German princes, had aims on the lives of
Queen Victoria and the Prince Regent. The Prussian police-
man who sent this sensational report to Berlin asked whether
it might not be advisable, in view of the tremendous importance
of the matter, to seek a personal audience of the Queen.
The audience was not granted, but on May 24, 1850, Man-
teuffel, the Prussian Prime Minister, sent copies of the report
to the British Foreign Office. Verbal representations seem also
to have been made to the British authorities, for in the summer
of 1850 Marx feared he was going to be expelled from England.
The English police were more intelligent than the Prussians
1 He teaches his partisans whom he one day counts on sending individually to
Germany on missioJls the nature of which may easily be guessed.
222 KARL MARX.* MAN AND FIGHTER
believed them to be, for they soon discovered what lay behind
the Prussian denunciations.
During the preparations for the Cologne trials police activi-
ties were redoubled. Their agents, having unlimited resources
at their disposal, got busy among the starving refugees and
succeeded in buying several of them. One of the most im-
portant refugee-spies was the Hungarian Colonel Bangya,
who was in the confidence of Kossuth and in the pay of the
French, Austrian and Prussian police at the same time. The
police dossiers of the time are full of reports of his having
attended a refugee meeting yesterday, of having read certain
letters the day before, and having gained the friendship of this
leader or the other. These bought ex-revolutionaries were able
to give information about Marx, and sometimes their reports
were very well informed. Bangya supplied particularly
detailed reports, for he enjoyed Marx’s friendship for several
months and was a frequent visitor at his house.
The reports of the properly informed agents did not help
the police, for they tended rather to vindicate than incriminate
the Cologne accused. They were unanimous in stating that
Marx repudiated armed risings and plots. So the police had
recourse to other methods. They had the house of one of
Willich’s followers broken into, and the records of the ‘Willich-
Schapper Party 5 fell into their hands almost complete. They
rounded these off with letters they forged themselves. The
‘Marx Party 5 documents were in the possession of Marx and
Engels and were better looked after, but the police managed
to get at them too. They manufactured a minute book with
forged reports of meetings that never took place. And now
the case was ready to begin.
For months Marx did practically nothing but work for the
accused, to whose defence he devoted all his energies, both
before and during the trial, which lasted for weeks. At the end
of October, 1852, Frau Marx wrote to a friend in America:
‘You will have followed the Communist monster trial in the
Kolniscke tyitwig. On October 23 the whole thing took such
a splendid and interesting turn, and one so favourable to the
accused, that our spirits began to revive a little again. You
can imagine that the “Marx Party 55 is active day and night,
and is working with head, hands and feet.
THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 223
‘The whole of the police case is lies. They steal, they forge,
they break desks open, they commit perjury and give false
evidence, and consider they have a perfect right to do so in the
case of the Communists, who are beyond the pale. This and
the blackguardly way the police have of taking over all the
functions of the public prosecutor and producing as proof, as
legally proved fact, unverified documents, ^sheer rumours,
reports and hearsay evidence is really hair-raising. My hus-
band has to work all day and far into the night, for all the
proofs of forgery have to be elaborated in London. Whole
documents have to be copied six or eight times over and sent
to Germany by the most various routes, via Frankfurt, Paris,
etc., for all letters addressed to my husband, and all letters
from here to Cologne are intercepted and opened. The whole
thing is now a struggle between the police on the one side and
my husband on the other, for everything, the whole revolution
and now the whole conduct of the defence, has been thrust
upon his shoulders.
‘Forgive my confused writing, but I have been somewhat
immersed in the plot myself, and I have been copying so much
that my fingers ache. Hence the confusion. Whole masses of
business addresses and fake business letters have just arrived
from Weerth and Engels to enable us to despatch documents,
etc., safely. A regular office has been established here. Two
or three of us write, others run messages, still others scrape
pennies together to enable the writers to keep themselves alive
and furnish proofs of the scandalous behaviour of the official
world. At the same time my three merry children sing and
whistle and their papa keeps on losing patience with them.
Such a hustling and bustling.’
Marx’s efforts resulted in the unmasking of some of the chief
forgeries and four of the eleven accused were acquitted, but
the pressure of the police and the Government on the jury
was so great that the other seven were convicted. They were
sentenced to from three to six years’ imprisonment in a fortress.
That was the end of the Communist League. After the
arrests in Cologne in 1851 it ceased to exist. In England it
only continued as an organisation to help the accused. Sen-
tence was pronounced in Cologne on November 12, 1852.
Five days later* the League, at Marx’s proposal, was declared
224 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
dissolved. Marx’s reason for this decision was that the League
was ‘no longer opportune. 5
Marx never again belonged to a secret organisation. General
political grounds and private grounds united in causing him
to refrain. Some American Communists proposed to reorgan-
ise the League at the end of the fifties, but he would have
nothing to do with it. He told them he was convinced he
could do more good to the working classes by his theoretical
labours than by participation in organisations the time for
which had gone by. He refused to join any secret organisa-
tions, ‘if only on the ground that such organisations might
endanger human beings in Germany.’ The conviction of his
Cologne comrades was a terrible blow to him. Roland
Daniels, the man for whom Marx had more affection than for
any other, succumbed early to illness contracted in prison.
‘His was a delicate, finely organised, thoroughly noble nature,’
Marx wrote in his letter of condolence to Frau Daniels. ‘In
him character, talents and aesthetic vision were in unusual
harmony. Daniels stood out among the people of Cologne like
a Greek statue thrust by some whimsical mischance among a
lot of Hottentots.’ Marx never got over the fact of men like
Daniels dying a sacrifice to Prussian police infamy. He was
convinced that the time for the workers’ movement in Western
Europe to organise itself into secret societies had gone.
Marx wrote his pamphlet, Revelations of the Communist
Trial in Cologne , in November and December, 1852. He
exposed all the abominable practices of the police, produced
documentary evidence of their forgeries, utterly demolished the
web of lies that they had spun. But the pamphlet did not
reach Germany. A fairly large edition of two thousand copies
was printed in Switzerland, but was confiscated when an
attempt was made to smuggle it over the frontier.
Another of Marx’s works had not fared much better shortly
before. Joseph Weydemeyer had founded a weekly paper in
America, where he emigrated in the autumn of 1850. It was
the only German paper at Marx’s disposal after the death of
the Neue Rheinische Zeitung-Revue. Marx started writing for The
Revolution , as it was called, an essay on The 18th Brumaire oj
Louis Bonaparte , referring to the Bonapartist coup d’etat of
December 2, 1850. But Weydemeyer was not, able to proceed
THE END OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE 225
with his first number, and the most brilliant of Marx’s shorter
historical works, in which, as Engels said, he gives a magnificent
example of how the materialist interpretation • of history can
explain an event which remains baffling from all other view-
points, might have remained unpublished had a German
worker not given Weydemeyer forty dollars, the whole of his
savings, to enable him to print it. The 18th Brjimaire appeared
as the first number of the monthly The Revolution. Although
several hundred copies found their way to Germany not a
single one appeared in any bookshop.
After the dispersal of the Communist League Marx resigned
from the Workers’ Educational Union and the refugees’
assistance committee. He shared in none of the busy inactivity
with which the more or less well-known Democratic leaders
in London, ‘the great men of the emigration’ as Marx called
them, filled their time waiting for the outbreak of the revolu-
tion which they believed to be imminent. He had nothing
but bitter sarcasm and contempt for their empty pathos, their
cliques and their factions, the whole of the hollow motions
through which they went. Th^y regarded him as a mischief-
maker, a proud, unsociable man who went his own way alone.
They hated him for being an obstinate Communist. An
example will suffice to show what excesses the bourgeois ‘emi-
grants’ were capable when they wanted to make Marx appear
contemptible.
In the summer of 1851 a rumour was spread in London that
Marx had become a contributor to the JVeue Preussische J^eitung,
the paper of extreme Reaction. It was partly under the con-
trol of Ferdinand von Westphalen, the Minister of the Interior
of whom Marx had said to his wife in jest in 1848 that her
brother was so stupid that he was sure to become a Prussian
minister one day. Neither Marx nor his wife had had the
slightest contact with him for many years. An obscure
German paper published in London eagerly took up the
slander and surpassed itself in innuendoes about the excellent
relations existing between the red revolutionary and the
minister of state. At that Marx, who granted the Press the
right to insult politicians, comedians and other public figures,
but not to slander them, lost patience and challenged the
editor to a duel# The editor was frightened out of his life and
15
226 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
printed in his next issue the apology that was dictated to him
and thus the incident was closed.
Since Engels had gone to live in Manchester, Marx was
practically alone in London. Material needs became more and
more pressing. In 1848, when the German revolution began
to peter out, Engels looked back with a smile of regret to the
‘sleepless night ,of exile’ during the years that led up to the
Revolution. The real and .dreadful ‘sleepless night of exile’
started now.
CHAPTER XVI
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE
Bonaparte’s coup d’ttat put the finishing external touch to
the European counter-revolution, which now held the whole
Continent in its grip. In Hungary, where the defence had been
heroic, the hangman now held sway. Austria was ruled as it
had been in the time of Metternich. In Prussia nothing was
left of the triumphant achievements of March but a pitiful
mock-constitutionalism which served as an admirable prop of
military despotism. The inner enemy was everywhere de-
feated. The way was once more clear for an active foreign
policy.
The revolution had not succeeded in solving a single one of
the numerous European national problems. Germany re-
mained carved into little pieces, Poland remained divided,
Italy was still rent asunder and Hungary enslaved. In the last
resort Austria and Prussia had been saved by Russia. Russian
troops had kept down the Poles and suppressed the Hungarian
revolution; and now the Tsar proceeded to claim his recom-
pense for saving Central Europe from ‘chaos.’ The oppor-
tunity of coming a step nearer to the capture of Holy Byzan-
tium, the principal aim of Russian foreign policy, was more
favourable than it had ever been before. Austria, just saved
by Russia from Kossuth and practically bankrupt in any case,
was bound to remain inactive, and Prussia was a vassal state.
No danger threatened from the West. France, or so they
believed in St. Petersburg, was not yet strong enough to resist
Russia alone, and the Tory Government in England could not
well defend the Crescent against the Cross.
The calculation was erroneous. France and England, much
as they wished to avoid war, were forced to come to the
assistance of Turkey. It was impossible for them to tolerate
Russia, even in the guise of a champion of Christianity,
gaining a foothold on the Dardanelles. In the spring of
1854 Russia found herself at war with England, France and
Turkey.
227
228
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
This was not the war Marx had longed for in 1848 and 1849.
This was no war against the stronghold of counter-revolution,
but a war of the three most important counter-revolutionary
powers among themselves. Marx welcomed it, for he who
fought Russia was working for the revolution, though he knew
it not and willed it not. Recent experience had shown once
more that the overthrow of Russia was an essential preliminary
to the victory of the proletariat. In the nineties Engels
summarised Marx’s reasons in two sentences. Tn the first
place the Russian Empire constitutes the great stronghold,
reserve position and reserve army of European reaction. The
mere fact of its existence is itself a danger and a threat to us.
In the second place it constantly interferes in European affairs
with the object of securing geographical points of vantage, all
with the aim of obtaining an ascendancy over Europe, and in
so doing interferes with our normal development and thus
makes the liberation of the European proletariat impossible.’
Being anti-Russian meant anything but being pro-English
or pro-French or even pro-Turkish. In France the most
arbitrary despotism held sway, in spite of, or rather because of,
the universal suffrage which under the Empire had become a
gigantic instrument of popular betrayal. Freedom of assembly
was as good as abolished, the workers’ right to combine was
taken away, the increase in the severity of the conditions of
the work-books made them the slaves of every minor police
official, and the whole country was given over a helpless prey
to the rapacity of the December bands, who did not hesitate
to take advantage of their opportunity. As for England, it
pretended to be waging ‘a war of civilisation against bar-
barism,’ but in defending Turkey it was really defending the
flanks of the route to India, where in Marx’s words, ‘the real
hypocrisy and the barbarism native to bourgeois civilisation
appears in all its nakedness.’ England treated the Irish with
even greater inhumanity, if such a thing were possible, than
that with which the Russian proprietor treated his serfs;
England was the country whose fate was determined by its
aristocracy and heartless middle-class alone, who were roused
to indignation at the maltreatment of Christians in Turkey
to-day, and at the suppression by the Russians of the noble
peoples of the Caucasus to-morrow, but had 1.0 objection to
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 229
eleven-year-old children slaving for ten or eleven hours a day
in the textile factories.
Europe was on the move again, but Marx was entirely cut
off from any possibility of direct political activity. After the
dissolution of the Communist League, which in any case would
not have been a suitable instrument for political action, no
other organisation existed. The German Press was closed to
Marx. He started writing for an unimportant paper in
Breslau, but that was not till the beginning of 1855, and in
any case it was sheer hack-work and after a year the paper was
discontinued. Marx’s connections in France were even more
tenuous; an occasional letter from a refugee in Paris, and that
was all. In England things were slightly better.
The Chartist Movement never succeeded in recovering from
its defeat in the spring of 1848. A few groups survived here
and there, practically without contact with one another. Many
leaders had deserted it, and with the end of the crisis the great
English workers’ movement seemed to be at an end too. Of
the two men whom Marx knew from earlier days, G. J. Harney
was undoubtedly as well-meaning and as devoted to the
workers’ cause as anyone could be, but he was quite obviously
incapable of resurrecting the expiring movement. He was
always full of enthusiasms, for Kossuth and Mazzini, for Marx
and for Willich. They were all such excellent men, and he
made heroes of them all. Marx and Engels had a private
name for him — ‘Citizen Hip-Hip-Hurrah!’ They soon parted
from him.
The one Chartist leader with whom Marx remained in
contact for long was Ernest Jones. Jones, energetic, perti-
nacious, clever, if sometimes over-clever, educated and an
excellent speaker, well-tried in struggle — he spent two years
in prison because of his part in the stormy demonstration of
1848 — had all the qualities of a great agitator. His fiery spirit
breathed new life into the movement. In March, 1854, he
actually succeeded in causing an All English Workers’ Parlia-
ment to meet in Manchester. Marx, who was invited as an
honorary delegate, sent an address in which he defined the
task of the parliament as ‘organisation of its united forces,
organisation of the working class on a national scale.’ But the
Chartists lacked the strength to overcome their defeat and
230 KARL MARX.* MAN AND FIGHTER
the movement increasingly disintegrated. Some of its old
adherents merged into petty-bourgeois reformist groups, others
lost interest, and Jones himself ended by joining John Bright’s
Radicals.
Marx found it exceedingly difficult to reconcile himself to
the idea of a powerful movement, which but a few years before
had been the chapipion of the European proletariat, ending in
this way. He went on hoping that it would flare up again,
be rekindled by some spontaneous act. When two hundred
thousand workers, artisans and small tradesmen demonstrated
against the Sunday Trading Bill in Hyde Park in June, 1855,
Marx believed the affair to be no less than ‘the beginning of
the English revolution.’ He and other German exiles took an
active part in it. Liebknecht writes in his memoirs that Marx,
who was liable to become very excited on such occasions, was
‘within a hair’s breadth of being seized by the collar by a
policeman and hauled before a magistrate, had not a warm
appeal to the thirst of the brave guardian of the law eventually
met with success.’ After a second demonstration the Bill was
withdrawn and the flickering flame extinguished.
The whole weakness of the Chartist Movement in the first
half of the fifties was demonstrated, among other things, by its
newspapers. Harney’s paper, The Red Republican , which
published the first English translation of the Communist Mani-
festo, ceased to appear after a short time and its successor, The
Friend of the People , had no better fate. From February, 1852,
onwards Jones produced a weekly, The People's Paper , but had
the greatest difficulty in keeping the ‘poor sheet’ (as Marx
called it) alive. Marx helped to edit it for a time. From the
autumn onwards he occasionally wrote articles for Jones and
allowed him to reprint articles which had appeared elsewhere.
But even the People's Paper had only a very limited circulation.
It was several times on the verge of bankruptcy and ended by
passing into the hands of a bourgeois radical group.
Apart from the Chartist Press, which was insignificant, the
only papers in England at Marx’s disposal were the Urquhartite
papers. When the Oriental question cropped up once more
in the spring of 1853 Marx at first paid very little attention to
it. In March he was still convinced that ‘in spite of all the
dirty work and the ranting in the newspapers it would never
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 231
be the cause of a European war/ Six months later Russia and
Turkey were at war, and when France and England entered the
fray a local dispute flared up into a European war. Marx
flung himself into the detestable question orientate , and for a time
even thought of learning Arabic and Turkish. He read all the
books on the Near East he could lay his hands on, and found
particular interest in the writings of David Urquhart, to which
Engels had drawn his attention. T am now reading Urquhart,
the crazy M.P., who declares that Palmerston is sold to Russia.
The explanation is simple; the fellow is a Highland Scot of
Lowland education, by nature a Romantic and by training a
Free Trader. The fellow went to Greece a philhellene and,
after being at daggers drawn with the Turks for three long
years, he went to Turkey and became an enthusiast for the
very Turks he had just been quarrelling with. He goes into
raptures over Islam, and his motto is: if I were not a Calvinist
I should be a Mohammedan. In his opinion Turks, particu-
larly those of the Golden Age of the Osmanli Empire, are the
most perfect nation on earth, without any exception whatever.
The Turkish language is the most perfect and melodious in the
world. The Turkish constitution in its ‘purity 5 is as fine as
any there could be, and is almost superior to the British. In
short, only the Turk is a gentleman and freedom exists only in
Turkey. 5
Urquhart went into raptures over Turkey because it was
barbaric. He went into raptures about the Middle Ages and
the Catholic Church for the same reason. He hated modern
industry, the bourgeoisie, universal suffrage, the Chartists and
revolutionaries of every kind. He was profoundly convinced
that all these were nothing but the tools of Russian diplomacy,
which made use of them to cause unrest in the West and
deliver it a helpless prey to Russian plans of world-conquest.
Marx soon saw that Urquhart was a complete monomaniac,
but his hatred of Russia might make him a useful ally.
Marx frequently praised the writings of Urquhart in the
articles on the Oriental question he wrote for the New York
Tribune from the summer of 1853 onwards. Whatever else
the Scot might be, he certainly knew the Near East better than
most of his contemporaries. The fact that there was no infamy
of which he did not think Russia capable only served to make
232 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Marx more favourably inclined towards him. Moreover, there
seemed to be an element of truth in his exaggerations. In
spite of Marx’s original scepticism, the more closely he studied
the recent history of Anglo-Russian relations the better-
founded did Urquhart’s imputations against British statesmen,
and Palmerston in particular, appear. Marx made an exhaus-
tive study of Hansard and subjected the diplomatic Blue Books
from 1807 to 1850 to an assiduous analysis. In November,
1853, he communicated the result of his researches to Engels:
‘Curious as it may seem to you, as a result of closely following
the footprints of the noble viscount for the past twenty years, I
have come to the same conclusion as the monomaniac Urqu-
hart, namely that Palmerston has been sold to Russia for
several decades.’
The irresolute, vacillating manner in which England and
France waged the war and their complaints of the Tsar’s
intransigeance, which made the compromise they desired so
difficult to obtain, only served to intensify Marx’s conviction
that Palmerston did not mean the war seriously and that the
war was a sham. Marx became a monomaniac like Urquhart.
He examined hundreds of diplomatic documents in the British
Museum, and in his opinion they revealed a secret connivance
between the Cabinets of London and St. Petersburg dating
from the time of Peter the Great. Marx now attacked Palmer-
ston with great vehemence. He did not directly accuse him
of being corrupted by Russia, but demonstrated ‘Palmerston’s
connivance with the St. Petersburg Cabinet from his transac-
tions with Poland, Turkey, Circassia, etc.’
Urquhart was delighted at Marx’s articles on Lord Palmer-
ston, which were published in the New York Tribune and the
People's Paper . E. Tucker, a publisher and a friend of Urqu-
hart’s, printed fifteen thousand copies of one of these articles
in the form of a fly-sheet, and not long afterwards he repro-
duced two more articles in the same form. In the summer of
1854 the Urquhartites, this time with the support of the
Chartists, started a campaign against secret diplomacy. The
campaign was chiefly directed against Palmerston. Their
organs, the Free Press in London and the Sheffield Free Press
reprinted many of Marx’s articles. Marx maintained his con-
tact with them until the middle of the sixties. Marx shrank at
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 233
nothing when it came to striking a blow at Russian Tsarism.
Later he actually wrote anti-Russian articles for Conservative
papers.
Apart from the Chartist movement and the Urquhartite
committees, some unimportant weeklies, and two or three
pamphlets, Marx’s voice in England was echoing in the void.
For ten whole years Marx had only one big newspaper through
which to speak, though his voice did not reach the English,
French and German proletariat for whom his words were
meant. From the summer of 1852 onwards Marx was a
regular correspondent of the New York Tribune , which in the
middle of the fifties had the largest circulation in the world.
The New York Tribune was founded in April, 1841, as an
organ of the advanced bourgeois intelligentsia, by Horace
Greeley, a former compositor who became a journalist.
Greeley was a friend of Albert Brisbane and the Rev. George
Ripley, two zealous disciples of the Socialist teaching of
Fourier. In the spring of 1842 he put his paper at the disposal
of Fourierist propaganda. Fourierism had many followers
among the educated classes in America at the time. Its colony
at Brook Farm, near Boston, was visited and encouraged by
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson, Channing and Margaret
Fuller. It was destroyed by fire in 1846 and financial difficul-
ties prevented its reconstruction. Many of the colonists went
to New York, where Charles A. Dana became city editor and
Ripley critic of the New York Tribune . It had a roll of contri-
butors unequalled by any other American paper, an un-
commonly high literary and political standard, and excellent
European correspondents, but was only moderately successful
prior to 1848, when, as the best-informed paper in America,
its circulation increased as a consequence of the outbreak of
the revolution. Dana was sent to Europe as a special corre-
spondent. He was in Paris during the June rising, went to
Berlin in the autumn and in November went to Cologne. It
may have been Brisbane, who was in Berlin at the time and
had met Marx in Paris, who drew Dana’s attention to him.
Dana paid Marx a visit and spent a delightful’ evening with
him, as he was fond of recalling in later years, and took away
with him an abiding impression that in Marx he had met the
most acute aryd far-seeing of the revolutionaries. In July,
234 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
1850, he wrote to Marx from New York that he always kept
himself informed of Marx’s activities and whereabouts and
asked him whether he would not like to come to America.
Marx’s answer is unknown. At the time Marx certainly had
plans to emigrate to America, as will be mentioned later.
After the collapse of the German revolution a great stream
of emigrants poured into the new, the free world. Half a
million Germans landed in New York in the years 1852 to 1854
alone. They took with them a lively interest in the affairs of
their native land. Even the native Americans, who did not
generally pay much attention to Europe, took much more
notice of it now than formerly. The New York Tribune , with
its excellent connections among the Democrats of the emigra-
tion, advanced in circulation by leaps and bounds. At the
beginning of August, 1851, Dana invited Marx to contribute.
Between August, 1851, and September, 1852, eighteen
articles on the revolution and counter-revolution in Germany
appeared in the New York Tribune . They appeared over Marx’s
signature, though not one of them was written by him. Marx
was so fully occupied on the great economic work which he was
anxious to complete as quickly as possible that he asked Engels
to write them in his stead, and Engels wrote them, as he later
wrote many more articles for Marx, either entirely or in part.
In May, 1852, Dana asked Marx to send him articles on
‘current events which throw light on the brewing revolu-
tionary crisis.’ Marx submitted the first article in August.
As his English was not yet adequate, he wrote in German,
which Engels translated. From February, 1853, onwards Marx
wrote his English articles himself. From then onwards Marx
worked very hard for the New York Tribune . During the first
year he sent no fewer than sixty articles to New York.
The work Marx did for the New York Tribune was not that
of an ordinary foreign correspondent. He contributed articles
which were comprehensive evaluations of recent events.
Sometimes he wrote regular essays. They were composed
hurriedly, because the steamer sailed twice a week, and if
Marx missed the mail an article was lost and he was £2 the
poorer. But every line he wrote was based on careful study.
Marx lacked both inclination and ability for the work of a
newspaper correspondent proper. He had littie contact with
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 235
political circles, still less with bourgeois circles, he avoided
journalists and could not dance attendance on the latest
sensations. From ten in the morning till seven at night he sat
in th e Reading Room of the British Museum. Before writing
an article on British rule in India he studied dozens of books
on the subject, and before his series on the Spanish revolution
he went through the whole of ancient and modern literature
relevant to the subject. Engels co-operated valiantly in his
own departments, i.e. military matters and geography. The
New York Tribune was more than pleased with the work of its
contributor. Sometimes Marx’s contributions were printed as
leading articles, and Dana did not shrink from inserting
sentences here and there and altering the beginning and end
to make it appear that the articles had been written in the
office. Engels’s military articles on the Turko-Russian War
attracted so much attention that their author was taken to be
the prominent General Winfield Scott, who was friendly with
Greeley and stood as a candidate for the presidency.
The New York Tribune , which was not so anxious to let its
readers see how much of the work was not its own, started
omitting Marx’s name more and more frequently. Marx
eventually insisted that either all his articles be signed or none,
and from the spring of 1855 they all appeared unsigned. At
first other Germans had contributed to the New York Tribune ,
including Freiligrath, Ruge and even Bruno Bauer, but from
the middle of the fifties Marx was its only diplomatic corre-
spondent in Europe.
The fees paid Marx for his articles were hardly in accordance
with the New York Tribune's appreciation of him as ‘its most
highly- valued contributor.’ For the first article Marx was
paid £i 9 and the fee was then raised to £ 2 . Marx was not
paid for all the articles he submitted but only for those that
were printed. The greatest concession that Marx ever ob-
tained was in the spring of 1857, when the Tribune agreed to
pay him for one dispatch a week, whether it were used or not.
The remainder were only to be paid for if they actually
appeared. The number of articles paid for rose and fell in
accordance with American interest in events in Europe,
whether because they directly affected the United States or
whether such things as wars, risings or crises were ‘sensational’
236 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
enough for them. ‘It is really disgusting, 5 Marx wrote to
Engels in January, 1857, ‘to be condemned to take it as a
favour that such a rag admits you to its company. To pound
and grind dry bones and make soup of them, as paupers do in
the workhouse, that is the sum total of the political work to
which one is generously condemned in such society. Although
I am only an ass, I am conscious of having given these rascals,
I will not say recently, but in former years, too much for their
money. 5
Irregular and uncertain as Marx’s income from the New
York Tribune was for nearly ten years, it was all he earned. In
spite of Engels’s unlimited sacrifices he would have been lost
without it.
When Marx arrived in London he was not in the least
worried about his immediate monetary prospects. He was
convinced that he would soon succeed in putting the Neue
Rheinische £eitung on its feet again in the form of a review. But
negotiations with the publishers dragged on for month after
month, and then Marx was taken ill. The contributions were
not ready in time and the first number appeared at the begin-
ning of March, 1850, instead of on January 1. The money
Marx brought with him — his wife had sold the furniture in
Cologne and she had pawned the silver in France — quickly
vanished. Other exiles, poverty-stricken themselves, were
unable to help. Marx had to provide for his wife, four young
children (Guido, his second son, was born in October, 1849)
and Lenchen Demuth, the faithful housekeeper. The house-
hold was reduced to an appalling state of destitution. At the
end of March, 1850, they were evicted. About this time Frau
Marx wrote to Wcydcmcyer: ‘I shall describe one day of this
life as it really was, and you will sec that perhaps few other
refugees have had to suffer so much. Since the cost of a wet-
nurse is prohibitive here, I decided, in spite of continual and
terrible pains in the breasts and the back, to nurse the child
myself. But the poor little angel drank in so much sorrow
with the milk that he was continually fretting, and in violent
pain day and night. He has not slept a whole night through
since he was born, but sleeps at most two or three hours.
Recently he has been subject to violent cramps, so that he is
continually hovering on the brink of life and death. When he
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 237
was suffering in this way he sucked so violently that my nipple
became sore and bled. Often the blood streamed into his
little mouth. As I was sitting like this one day our landlady
suddenly appeared. In the course of the winter we had paid
her more than two hundred and fifty thalers, and we had
arranged with her that in future we were not to pay her but
the landlord, who had put in an execution. Now she denied
this agreement and demanded the £5 we still owed her. As
we could not pay this sum at once two brokers entered the
house and took possession of all my belongings; bedding, linen,
clothes, everything, even the poor baby’s cradle and the better
toys belonging to the girls, who stood by, weeping bitterly.
They threatened to take everything away in two hours’ time,
when I should have had to lie on the bare floor with my
freezing children and my aching breast. Our friend Schramm
hurried into the town to seek help. He got into a cab, but the
horses ran away. He jumped out and was brought back
bleeding to the house, where I was in despair with my poor
shivering children.
£ We had to leave the house next day. It was cold and rainy
and dreary. My husband tried to find a lodging for us, but
no one was willing to have us when he mentioned the four
children. At last a friend helped us and we paid what was
owing. I quickly sold all my beds in order to settle with the
chemist, the baker, the butcher and the milkman, who were
all filled with alarm when they heard the broker’s men were in
and rushed to send in their bills. The beds I sold were taken
to the street door and loaded on to a hand-cart — and what do
you think happened? By this time it had grown late and it
was long after sunset, after which moving furniture in this way
is illegal by English law. The landlord appeared with a
number of constables, and said that some of his property
might be on the cart, we might be escaping to a foreign
country. In less than five minutes a crowd of two or three
hundred people had gathered outside our front door — the
whole Chelsea mob. The beds were brought in again, and
could not be sent to the purchaser until next morning. Now
that the sale of our goods and chattels had enabled us to pay
our debts to the last penny, I moved with my little darlings to
two tiny roonts at our present address, the German Hotel,
238 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
1, Leicester Street, Leicester Square, where we found a human
reception for £5 10 s. a week.
‘Do not imagine that these petty sufferings have bent me.
I know only too well that our struggle is no isolated one, that
I belong to the favoured and the fortunate, since my dear
husband, the mainstay of my life, is still at my side. The only
thing that really crushes me and makes my heart bleed is all
the pettinesses that he has to suffer, the fact that so few have
come to his aid, and that he, who has so willingly and gladly
helped so many, should be helpless here. But you are not to
think, my dear Herr Wcydemeyer, that we are making claims
on anyone. The only thing that my husband might have
expected of those who have had so many ideas, so much
encouragement, so much support from him was that they
might have devoted more practical energy to his Review , might
have taken a greater interest in it. I am proud and bold enough
to suggest this. That little I think they owed him. But my
husband thinks otherwise. Never, even at the most terrible
times, has he lost his confidence in the future, or even his
cheerful humour. 5
In the middle of May Marx and his family moved to Soho,
the quarter where the most poverty-stricken refugees lived.
He rented two small rooms in Dean Street, and there he lived
for six years, in a noisy, dirty street, in a neighbourhood where
epidemic after epidemic raged. In 1854 the cholera was worse
in Soho than anywhere else. Three of his children died there.
Those were unspeakably dreadful years.
The Neue Rheinische %eitung-Revue brought Marx in less than
thirty thalers in all, and it was impossible to go on with it.
Marx sold his library, which he had left in Cologne, got into
debt, pawned everything that was not nailed fast. After the
miscarriage of their literary plans Engels could no longer
remain in London. He returned to ‘fiendish commerce 5 in the
autumn of 1853 and went to Manchester, to his father’s cotton-
mill, where he worked at a moderate salary as an ordinary
employee. Engels’s conviction that the revolution would soon
free him from his ‘Egyptian bondage 5 enabled him to tolerate
a life he hated. But his chief aim was to help Marx. Marx,
the brains of the revolutionary party, the genius, in comparison
with whom he felt his own gifts to be merely ta’ents, must not
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 239
be allowed to perish in poverty-stricken refugeedom. For
twenty long years Engels worked at a job he hated, abandoning
his own scientific work in order to make possible the work of
his friend. He wrote newspaper articles for him and gave him
as much money as he could. During the early years this was
not a great deal. Engels’s salary increased only gradually, and
he had considerable social responsibilities of his own. He had
to maintain a ‘respectable 5 household, and another in which
he lived with an Irish daughter of the people named Mary
Burns, and he kept Mary’s relatives as well, but every pound
he could possibly spare was sent to Marx, whose position
became more and more desperate every month. In the
autumn of 1850 Marx seriously considered the idea of emi-
grating to America, where he hoped to be able to found a
German paper. Rothacker, who had taken part in the rising
in Baden, was asked to prepare the ground among friends and
acquaintances in New York. He wrote to Marx in November,
saying that the prospects were as bad as they could possibly be.
The immediate prospects in London, whatever they were,
were better than they were in New York. Little Guido died,
‘a sacrifice to bourgeois misery,’ as Marx said to Engels. A
daughter, Franziska, was born in March, 1851. When she
died, barely one year old, Marx was forced to borrow money
from a French emigre to pay for the coffin.
Marx wished to continue the review as a quarterly, but the
publisher refused. Marx devoted all his energy to his book
on economics. He and his friends in Germany spent months
negotiating with every conceivable publisher, but not one of
them was willing to have anything to do with him. Marx’s
name alone was sufficient to put them into a panic. Hermann
Becker tried to get Marx’s Collected Essays published in Cologne.
One volume appeared and that was all. Marx offered the
publishers a pamphlet on Proudhon, then a translation of
Misire de la Philosophies he offered to contribute to periodicals
and was willing to write ‘completely innocuous’ articles. But
all his suggestions were declined. Had friends — notably the
excellent Daniels — not helped him, he would have starved in
1851. ‘You can well imagine that the situation is very gloomy,’
Marx wrote to Weydemeyer. ‘It will be the end of my wife if
it goes on much longer. The never-ending worries of the
24O KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
petty, paltry, bourgeois struggle are a terrible strain on her.
To add to it there are all the infamies of my opponents, who
never dared attack me but avenge themselves for their im-
potence by spreading the most unspeakable infamies about
me and making me socially suspect. I should, of course, only
laugh at the filth. I do not lbt them disturb me for one moment
in my work. But you will understand that my wife, who is
ailing, and has to endure the most dismal poverty from morn-
ing till night, and whose nervous system is upset, is none the
better for having to listen to stupid go-betweens who daily
report to her the outpourings of the democratic cesspools.
The tactlessness of some of these people is often amazing.’
Naturally Marx did not receive a single penny for his 18th
Brumaire . That was work for the Party. His battle for the
defendants at the Cologne trial and his unmasking of the police
in his Revelations was Party work too. During the second half
of 1852 these activities occupied all his time. All this work
was carried out under the most unspeakable difficulties. In
February he reached the ‘pleasant point’ when he could not go
out because his coat was in pawn and he could no longer eat
meat because he could not get any more credit. His wife,
little Jenny and Lenchen Demuth were taken ill. T could not
and cannot fetch the doctor,’ Marx wrote to Engels, ‘because
I have no money for medicine. For the last eight to ten days
I have fed my family on bread and potatoes, and to-day it is
still doubtful whether I shall be able to obtain even these.’
Towards the end of the year the situation at last began to
improve. Engels was able to send more money and the first
payments arrived from the New York Tribune . But up to 1858
there were always times, even in the ‘good’ years, when Marx
scarcely had a penny in his pocket. The children learned to
resist the siege of creditors — the butcher, the milkman, and the
baker — by saying: ‘Mr. Marx ain’t upstairs.’ Once Marx was
forced to fly to Manchester because of a doctor who threatened
to sue him for a £26 debt, and the gas and water were going
to be cut off. The following description of Marx’s household,
written by a Prussian spy who managed to ingratiate his way
into it, is not without malice and is not to be credited word
for word, but gives a pretty good idea of the general atmosphere
of the life Marx led in 1853.
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 24.I
‘The chief leader of this party, (i.e. the Communists) is
Karl Marx; the minor leaders are Friedrich Engels in Man-
chester, Freiligrath and Wolff (called “Lupus 55 ) in London,
Heine in Paris, Weydemeyer and Cluss in America. Burgers
and Daniels were the leaders in Cologne and Weerth in Ham-
burg. All the rest are simple members. The moving and
active spirit, the real soul of the Party, is Marx, for which
reason I propose to give you a personal description of the man.
‘Marx is of medium stature, and is thirty-four years of age.
Although he is still in the prime of life, his hair is turning grey.
His frame is powerful, his features bring Szemere (a Hungarian
revolutionary) to mind very strongly, but his complexion is
darker and his hair and beard quite black. Lately he does
not shave at all. His big, piercing, fiery eyes have something
demoniacally sinister about them. The first impression one
receives is that of a man of genius and energy; his intellectual
superiority exercises an irresistible power on his surroundings.
‘In private life he is an extremely untidy and cynical human
being. He is a bad host and leads a regular Bohemian exis-
tence. Washing and combing himself and changing his linen
are rarities with him, and he likes getting drunk. He often
idles away for days on end, but when he has a great deal to
do he works day and night with tireless endurance. He has
no fixed times for going to bed or for getting up. He often
stays up for whole nights, then lies down fully clothed on the
couch at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by people
coming in or going out, for everyone has a free entree to his
house.
‘His wife is the sister of von Westphalen, the Prussian
Minister, and is a cultured and charming woman, who has
accustomed herself to this Bohemian existence out of love for
her husband, and she now feels quite at home in poverty. She
has two daughters and a son, and all three children are really
handsome and have their father’s intelligent eyes.
‘As husband and father, Marx, in spite of his restless and
wild character, is the gentlest and mildest of men. He lives in
one of the worst, therefore one of the cheapest neighbourhoods
in London. He occupies two rooms. The room looking out
on the street is the parlour, and the bedroom is at the back.
There is not one® clean or decent piece of furniture in either
16
242 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
room, but everything is broken, tattered and torn, with thick
dust over everything and the greatest untidiness everywhere.
In the middle of the parlour there is a large old-fashioned
table, covered with oil-cloth. On it there lie manuscripts,
books and newspapers, besides the children’s toys, bits and
pieces from his wife’s sewing basket, and cups with broken rims,
dirty spoons, knives, forks, lamps, an ink-pot, tumblers, some
Dutch clay-pipes, tobacco ash — all in a pile on the same
table.
‘On entering Marx’s room smoke and tobacco fumes make
your eyes water to such an extent that for the first moment
you seem to be groping about in a cavern, until you get used
to it and manage to pick out certain objects in the haze. Every-
thing is dirty, and covered with dust, and sitting down is quite
a dangerous business. Here is a chair with only three legs,
there another, which happens to be whole, on which the chil-
dren are playing at cooking. That is the one that is offered to
the visitor, but the children’s cooking is not removed and if
you sit down you risk a pair of trousers. But all these things
do not in the least embarrass either Marx or his wife. You are
received in the most friendly way and are cordially offered
pipes, tobacco and whatever else there may happen to be.
Eventually a clever and interesting conversation arises to make
amends for all the domestic deficiencies, and this makes the
discomfort bearable. You actually get used to the company,
and find it interesting and original. That is a faithful picture
of the family life of Marx, the Communist chief.’
However bad things were with Marx, he always kept up
the outward appearance of an orderly bourgeois life. He was
unwilling to allow the ‘asses of Democrats’ a cheap triumph
and his pride brooked no sympathy. Only his most intimate
friends knew of his distressed condition. He did not bow under
the burden of want, but reacted to it only with anger at its
compelling him to put aside the work which alone meant
anything to him and which, as he well knew, he alone could
do, and forcing him to postpone it again and aaain for the
revolting slavery of working for his daily bread, unshakable
belief in his mission kept up Jenny’s courage as well as his own.
Even in their most difficult years Jenny and Marx remained
happy people. Unfortunately there are very few documents
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 243
that throw light on this period. There are Wilhelm Lieb-
knecht’s memoirs, a few pages from a diary of a friend of
Jenny’s youth, and a few letters written by other exiles. The
following passage from Liebknecht’s memoirs is characteristic
of Marx and his friends:
c Our outings to Hampstead Heath ! If I live to be a thousand
I shall never forget them. A Sunday spent on Hampstead
Heath was our greatest treat. The children would talk of
nothing else during the whole week and even we grown-ups
looked forward to it, old and young alike. Even the journey
there was a treat. The girls were excellent walkers, as nimble
and tireless as cats. When we got there the first thing we would
do was to find a place to pitch our tent, so that the tea and beer
arrangements might be thoroughly looked after. After a meal,
the company would search for a comfortable place to sit or lie
down, and when this had been done everybody would pull
a Sunday paper, bought on the way, from his pocket, and —
assuming a snooze was not preferred — would start reading or
talking politics, while the children, who would quickly find
playmates, would play hide-and-seek in the bushes.
‘But this placidity sometimes demanded a change, and we
would run races, to say nothing of indulging in wrestling, stone-
throwing and similar forms of sport. The greatest treat was a
general donkey-ride. What laughter and jubilation a general
donkey-ride caused! And what comic scenes! And how Marx
enjoyed himself and amused us too. He amused us doubly;
in the first place by his more than primitive horsemanship and
secondly by the fanaticism with which he asserted his virtuosity
in the art. The virtuosity was based on the fact that he once
took riding lessons during his student years, but Engels main-
tained that he never had more than three lessons, and that
when he visited him in Manchester once in a blue moon he
would go for one ride on a venerable Rosinante. On the way
home we would usually sing. We seldom sang political songs,
but mostly popular songs, especially sentimental ballads and
“patriotic” songs from the “Fatherland,” especially 0 Strass -
burg , 0 Strass burg, du vounderschone Stadt , which enjoyed uni-
versal popularity. Or the children would sing nigger songs
and dance to them. On the way there and back politics or the
plight of the refugees were banned as subjects of conversation.
244 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
But to make up for it we would talk a lot about literature and
art, and Marx had the opportunity of displaying his astonishing
memory. He would declaim long passages from the Divina
Commedia and scenes from Shakespeare, in which his wife, who
was also an excellent Shakespearian scholar, often relieved
him. 5
Among the Marxes Shakespeare was a regular family cult.
Frau Marx once wrote to Frau Liebknecht, telling her with
great satisfaction that her youngest daughter had made a
Shakespeare museum of her little room. When Marx wanted
to perfect his English, at a time when he could read but not
speak it, he sought out and listed all Shakespeare’s own ex-
pressions. In later years the whole Marx family would often
walk all the way from Haverstock Hill to the Sadlers Wells
Theatre, to see Phelps, the Shakespearian actor. They used
to stand, for they could not afford seats. The children knew
whole scenes of Shakespeare by heart before they could read
properly.
In January, 1855, Frau Marx, who was then forty-one years
old, had a daughter. ‘The “bona fide traveller” is, I regret to
say, of the sex par excellence , 5 Marx wrote to Engels. He had
wanted a son to replace the dead Guido, who had been called
‘Foxie, 5 after the popular Fawkes of the Gunpowder Plot.
Everyone was given a nickname in Marx’s house. Marx him-
self was called ‘the Moor, 5 as he had been called ever since his
student days on account of his dark complexion and black
hair, and his wife and children and all his acquaintances called
him that too. The children varied ‘Moor 5 mostly with ‘Devil 5
or ‘Old Nick. 5 Frau Marx was never called anything but
‘Mbhme. 5 The eldest daughter, Jenny, was called ‘Qui-qui, 5
‘Di 5 and even the ‘Emperor of China. 5 The next daughter,
Laura, was called ‘Hottentot 5 and ‘Kakadu, 5 the son, Edgar,
was called ‘Musch 5 or, more respectfully, ‘Colonel Musch, 5
and the youngest daughter, who was named Eleanor, was at
first called ‘Quo-quo 5 then ‘Dwarf Alberich 5 and finally
‘Tussy. 5 Tussy described some of the incidents of her childhood
in Loose Leaves , which she wrote in 1895. She remembered
how Marx carried her on his shoulders, and put anemones in
her hair. ‘Moor was certainly a magnificent horse. I was
told that my elder sisters and brother used t$ harness Moor
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 245
to an armchair, seat themselves in it and make him pull it.
Indeed he wrote several chapters of The 18th Brumaire in his
role as “gee-up neddy” to his three children, who sat behind
him on chairs and whipped him/
Everyone intimate with Marx — Liebknecht, Lessner, La-
fargue, and even only occasional visitors to his house — spoke of
Marx’s unbounded love for his children. Marx often remarked
that what he liked best about Jesus was his love of children,
and his daughter had heard him say that he could forgive
Christianity a great deal for teaching the love of children. A
year before his death Marx wrote to his daughter, Laura, that
he was coming to Paris to find peace there. ‘By peace I mean
family life, children’s voices, the whole of that “microscopic
little world” which is so much more interesting than the
“macroscopic” world/
The voice of his favourite child was extinguished on April 6,
1855, when little Musch died. Marx generally hid his feelings,
even from his closest friends. He was by nature so shy that he,
a German, behaved with English reserve when it came to ex-
pressing his feelings. But in the letters he wrote during the
days that followed the child’s death his grief broke through
the barriers. The beginning of a letter to Engels written on
March 30 is quite matter-of-fact. He said that he had put off
sending a daily health-bulletin, because the course of the illness
was so up-and-down that one’s opinion changed almost hourly.
Finally the illness had turned into abdominal tuberculosis,
and even the doctor had seemed to give up hope. For the last
week his wife had been suffering from a nervous breakdown
more severe than she had ever had before. Marx’s next words
were: ‘As for me, my heart bleeds and my head burns, though
of course I have to keep control of myself.’ The next sentence
sounds as if Marx were making an apology. That a father
should so far forget himself as to talk of his heart bleeding over
the death of his favourite child seems to him to demand an
explanation. ‘During his illness the child did not for a moment
act out of harmony with his original, kind and independent
character/ On April 6 he wrote: ‘Poor Musch is no more.
He fell asleep (literally) in my arms between five and six o’clock
to-day. I shall never forget how your friendship helped us
through this tfjrrible time. You understand my grief for the
246 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
child. 5 A week later he wrote: ‘The house is naturally utterly
desolate and forlorn since the death of the dear child who was
its living soul. It is impossible to describe how we miss him
at every turn. I have suffered every kind of misfortune, but
I have only just learned what real unhappiness is. . . . In the
midst of all the suffering which I have gone through in these
days, the thought of you and your friendship, and the hope
that we may stiH have something reasonable to do in this world
together, has kept me upright. 5 At the end of July Marx
answered a letter of condolence as follows: ‘Bacon says that
really important people have so many contacts with nature
and the world, have so much to interest them, that they easily
get over any loss. I am not one of those important people.
My child’s death has affected me so greatly that I feel the loss
as keenly as on the first day. My wife is also completely broken
down. 5 The wound never completely healed. Even after
ten years and more Jenny Marx had not overcome her grief.
‘The longer I live without the child, the more I think of him
and with the greater grief, 5 she wrote to a friend.
In the summer of 1856 Frau Marx went to Trier with her
daughter to visit her mother. She found her dying. An uncle
of hers had died not long before, but he was an old man of
eighty-seven whom she barely knew, and his death, as Marx
put it, ‘was a very happy event. 5 The bequest from the two
relatives made it possible for them to pay their old debts.
In the autumn of 1856 they were at last able to change their
two-room dwelling in Soho for a comfortable little house on
the outskirts of the city at 9, Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park,
Haverstock Hill. But the improvement did not last for long,
the New York Tribune accepted fewer and fewer of Marx’s
articles. They needed practically all their space for American
politics and articles on the presidential elections, which had to
be given preference to events in Europe, and then the approach-
ing crisis began to cast its shadows before.
Marx and Engels had expected the crisis even sooner. As
early as January, 1855, England, in Marx’s opinion, was in
the midst of a great trade crisis. Yet the dies irae> which,
Engels hoped, would ‘ruin the whole of European industry,
glut all the markets, involve all the possessing classes, and cause
the complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, 5 « did not arrive
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 247
until the autumn of 1857, and then not nearly so dramatically
as Engels expected, though assuredly it was terrible enough.
The first great crisis of the capitalist world started in America
and embraced the leading countries of Europe; England as
well as Germany and France. Marx and Engels thought their
time had come. Marx wrote to his friend that, in spite of his
own ‘financial distress, 5 since 1849 he had never felt so ‘cosy 5
as after this outbreak, and Engels himself felt ‘enormously
cheered. 5 The time had come to finish his economic work.
On December 8, 1857, he wrote to Engels that he was working
‘like mad 5 right through the night summing up his economic
studies, in order to have at least the outlines in his head before
the deluge.
In the winter of 1850-1 Marx had resumed work on the
economic study he had started in Brussels and had had neither
the time nor the inclination to complete during the years of
revolution. In his thorough way he collected all the available
material, made his way once more through the works of the
great economists and in April, 1851, believed that after the
five more weeks he intended to devote to the ‘whole economic
drudgery (f a commence a rn'ennuyerY he would be able to sit
down and start to write his book. Two months later he set
himself a new date. The material, he remarked to Weycle-
meyer, had so many damned ramifications that in spite of all
his exertions he would not be ready for another six or eight
weeks. All the same, in spite of all outward disturbances, the
thing was hurrying to a conclusion. ‘The Democrat simple-
tons, to whom enlightenment comes from above, naturally do
not need to make such exertions. Why should they, born as
they are under a lucky star, trouble themselves with economic
and historical material? The whole thing is so simple, as the
valiant Willich used to tell me. 5 But even this respite expired.
First more political work intervened, and from 1853 to 1856
his theoretical economic labours languished altogether. Though
Marx gave a great deal of attention to economic events, his
own economic work had to give way to the task of trying
to earn a living. Occasionally Marx looked through his
old notebooks and read fragments here and there, but it was
the crisis that first compelled him to take up the work at the
point at whi$h he had broken off more than six years before.
248 KARL MARX*. MAN AND FIGHTER
The crisis affected Marx personally very severely. In
October the New York Tribune informed him that it had dis-
missed all its European correspondents except B. Taylor and
himself, and that in future he was only to send one article a
week. Distress once more entered the household from which it
had only just been banished. Marx’s wife was ill and the first
signs of the serious liver trouble which was to attack Marx
repeatedly in yeai's to come made their appearance in the
summer. Marx’s financial distress increased rapidly during
the winter, and at the beginning of 1858 he had reached a pitch
when he wished himself a hundred fathoms deep under the
earth rather than go on living in the same way. He wrote
to Engels that he himself was able to escape from the wretched-
ness by concentrating hard on all sorts of general questions,
but his wife did not have these resources. A few weeks later
he wrote that it was fortunate so many cheering things were
happening in the outside world, because personally he was
leading ‘the most troubled life that can be imagined.’ There
could be nothing more stupid for people of universal aspirations
than to marry and give themselves up to the petites misires de la
vie domestique et privee , he said. But even if the house tumbled
about his head he was determined to finish his book. Marx
worked so hard that in April, 1858, he collapsed. He com-
plained to Engels that if he so much as sat down and wrote for
a few hours it meant that he had to lie down and do nothing
for a few days. In the summer the situation had become
‘absolutely intolerable.’ On July 15, 1858, he wrote to Engels
that as a direct result of the position he was in he was completely
incapable of work, partly because he lost the best part of his
time vainly running about trying to raise money, partly because
his powers of concentration could no longer hold out against
his domestic troubles, ‘perhaps in consequence of physical
deterioration. . . . The inevitable final catastrophe cannot
be averted much longer.’ A loan of £40 which Freiligrath
arranged for him and on which Marx had to pay twenty per
cent interest, helped him over the worst for a few weeks.
Marx’s manuscript was finished at the end of January, 1859.
It was not Das Kapital , the great work that Marx had planned.
The first volume, an edition of a thousand copies of which
now appeared in Berlin — it had been very difficult to find a
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 249
publisher — was called Critique of Political Economy and consisted of
only two chapters, on goods and money. It had appeared,
as Marx hoped it would, ‘before the deluge/ but that was be-
cause the deluge did not occur. In 1859 the crisis had passed,
the old world had not collapsed, the revolution had not come.
The effects of the crisis continued.
New political life awoke in Germany, though very faint-
heartedly. In Italy the movement for n^tiflnal liberation
flared up anew. France’s industry had been hard hit by the
crisis, the state finances were disorganised, the price of corn
fell, the peasants, who constituted Bonaparte’s strongest sup-
port, were grumbling, opposition reared its head among the
petty-bourgeoisie, the workers were gradually shaking off the
paralysis which had held them in its grip since June, 1848.
In this threatening situation the Emperor took the way out
that lay nearest to his hand and went to war — not a general
European war, the consequences of which could not be fore-
seen, but a localised war in which he had the maximum chances
of victory. A victory over Austria and the expulsion of the
Austrians from Italy was bound to strengthen his position,
bind the army to him once more and confirm the false Napoleon
as the legitimate successor of the true.
Marx’s attitude to the Franco-Austrian War of 1859 was
determined, like his attitude to the Crimean War, by the
interests of the revolution only. The revolutionary party,
weak as it might be, must do everything in its power to prevent
Bonaparte’s victory. The Austrian hangman’s yoke in Italy
must certainly be broken, but he who assumed the task of
delivering the people of Italy was the enslaver of the people of
France, and victory would only confirm his power. The defeat
of Austria, which since the middle of the eighteenth century
had opposed the advance of Russia in Eastern Europe, though
its opposition was ‘helpless, inconsequent, cowardly but stub-
born,’ could only be advantageous to Russian Tsarism. The
enemy was Napoleon III and Russia. Even if victory should
liberate the Italians — as in fact it did not — the interests of the
European revolution came before those of Italian national
liberation.
In their attitude on this occasion Marx and Engels were
practically alon£ in the revolutionary camp. To the German
25O KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
radicals the Russian danger seemed remote, but reactionary
Austria was close at hand. It was difficult to be anti-Austrian
without being Bonapartist. Lassalle achieved a masterpiece.
Some of the German Democratic Emigres were noticeably
edging towards Badinguet (which was what Marx called
Napoleon. He either called him Badinguet or Boustrapa or
Barnum, or at most Louis Bonaparte, but Napoleon never).
The German ifnigrSs had political reasons for their attitude.
But there were also those who proclaimed the Emperor’s
European and more specifically German mission in a torrent
of tyrannicidal words because they were paid to do so. Among
them was Karl Vogt, a former Left leader in the Frankfurt
Parliament, and now a professor in Switzerland and the ideal
of the ‘enlightened 5 philistines.
A small German newspaper in London which was more or
less on good terms with Marx accused Vogt of being a bought
agent of Napoleon. The accusations were reproduced in a
leading reactionary paper in Germany. Vogt well knew that
his patron would not betray him and brought an action against
the newspaper. When it came into court the people in London
who had hitherto acted as if they had the clearest proofs of
Vogt’s venality suddenly assumed the attitude of knowing
nothing whatever about it, and Vogt, though his case was dis-
missed on technical grounds, left the court in the triumphant
role of injured innocent. He published the report of the trial,
at the same time attacking Marx as the ringleader of those who
had slandered him, in spite of the fact that Marx had nothing
whatever to do with the whole affair. Vogt alleged that Marx
was the leader of a gang of emigres who made a good living by
blackmailing revolutionaries, threatening to denounce them to
the police, and by forging banknotes.
Vogt’s allegations were woven into such a highly ingenious
web of lies, with truth and known fact so skilfully blended with
half-truths and impudent fabrications, that some of the in-
sinuations were bound to stick in the minds of those not fully
acquainted with the facts of ‘emigrant’ history. Marx tried
in vain to bring an action against Vogt and his friends. It was
impossible to allow the slander to go unchallenged. Distasteful
though it was for him to reply, and hating as he did the necessity
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 25I
himself, which, as he said with truth, he generally scrupulously
avoided, he decided that the measure of success likely to be
obtained by Vogt’s tissue of lies compelled him to speak. His
polemical Herr Vogt , a book of one hundred and ninety pages,
appeared at the end of November. Marx transferred the
accusation of lying to its author, and his analysis of Vogt’s
writings made practically a certainty of the suspicion that he
was in the pay of Napoleon. Papers published* by the Republi-
can Government in 1871 supplied the documentary proof. In
August, 1859, forty thousand francs had been paid Vogt out
of the Emperor’s private fund.
Marx’s fight against the attempt to secure his political
annihilation by means of these denunciations occupied more
than a year of his life. He was not able to resume his economic
work until the middle of 1861. The years i860 to 1863 were
among the gloomiest of Marx’s life. At the end of November,
1861, his wife went down with small-pox. She had barely
recovered when Marx was taken ill himself. For years he
suffered from carbuncles and boils, which were apt to break
out again as soon as they had healed, and often made him
unable to work for weeks. He was ‘plagued like Job, though
not so God-fearing,’ as he wrote to Engels. The doctors gave
him excellent advice. ‘Everything the gentlemen say boils
down to the fact that one ought to be a prosperous rentier
and not a poor devil like me, as poor as a church mouse.’
When Marx said that in 1868 he was much better off than he
was at the beginning of the sixties. In January, i860, the
New York Tribune asked him to send nothing for six weeks.
After this interval his work was only accepted intermittently.
A connection with the Vienna Presse seemed to offer a substitute,
but after three months’ hard work Marx only received six
pounds in all. His connection with the New York Tribune
finally ended in April, 1862. He was told that all its space was
needed for American affairs, and therefore his correspondence
must cease. This dried up Marx’s only source of income.
Engels, whose position in the firm of Ermen and Engels had
gone on improving, sent Marx what he could and preserved
the numerous family from the worst.
Once more everything that could be spared, and many
things that coitfd not be spared, including the children’s shoes
252 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
and clothes, resumed the trail to the pawnshop. In the spring
of 1 86 1 Marx went to Holland to see his uncle, Lion Philips,
who gave him an advance of £ 1 60 on his share of his mother’s
estate. Most of this sum went to repay old debts, and in
November Marx was once more forced to write to Engels,
telling him that his wife was suffering from such a serious
nervous breakdown that he was afraid that if the struggle went
on much longer; there would be a disaster. ‘Take all in all,’
he wrote in February, 1862, ‘a lousy life like this is not worth
living.’ In the summer of 1862 Marx tried once more to per-
suade his mother to help him, but she would not give him a
penny. ‘My wife says she wishes she were with her children
in her grave,’ he wrote to Engels at the time, ‘and I really
cannot blame her, for the humiliations, sufferings and horrors
which we have had to go through are really indescribable.’
Marx was determined to pursue his aim through thick and
thin. In 1859 he wrote to a friend that he would not allow
bourgeois society to turn him into a ‘money-making machine.’
But he had now reached such a pitch of distress that he
wanted to become a money-making machine. In 1862 he
applied for a job in a railway office, but his application was
rejected on account of his bad handwriting. Jenny, the eldest
daughter, unknown to her parents, wanted to go on the stage,
not because she had any special inclination towards it, but for
the sake of earning some money. Marx considered whether
he should not break up his home, find posts as governesses for
his two elder daughters and move with his wife and youngest
child into a lodging house in the poorest district in London.
Engels sent a five-pound note, and then another and another,
and nearly lost his temper when Marx apologised for ‘pressing’
him.
In January, 1863, their friendship survived the first and only
strain to which it was submitted. Engels lost his wife. ‘I
simply cannot tell you how I feel,’ he wrote to Marx in a short
note telling him the news. ‘The poor girl loved me with all
her heart.’ Marx wrote back: ‘The news of Mary’s death has
both astonished and dismayed me. She was extremely good-
natured, witty and very attached to you.’ He then went straight
on to describe his own desperate attempts to raise money. His
letter ended with: ‘It is revoltingly egoistical of me to retail all
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 253
these horrors to you at such a moment. But the thing is
homoeopathic. One evil cancels out another. At the end of my
tether as I am, what am I to do? There is not a single human
being in all London to whom I can speak freely, and at home
I play the silent stoic, to counterpoise the outbreaks from the
other side. Work under such circumstances is absolutely
impossible. Instead of Mary should it not have been my
mother, who is full of bodily infirmities and 1/as lived her life?
You see what strange notions we “civilised” people get under
the stress of certain circumstances.* Engels was deeply hurt.
He wrote to Marx that all his friends had shown him more
sympathy and friendship than he could have expected on this
occasion, which affected him deeply, and ‘to you it seemed
a suitable moment for the display of the superiority of your
frigid way of thinking. So be it!’
Marx allowed some time to elapse before replying. ‘It was
very wrong of me to write that letter, and I regretted it as soon
as it was sent,* he wrote. ‘It was not prompted by heartless-
ness. My wife and children will confirm me when I say that
your letter, which arrived early in the morning, affected me as
much as the death of one of my own nearest and dearest. When
I wrote to you the same evening it was under the stress of very
desperate circumstances. The brokers had been put in by the
landlord; I had a summons from the butcher; there was neither
coal nor food in the house and little Jenny was ill in bed. The
only way out of such circumstances that I know is, generally
speaking, cynicism.’ Engels thanked his friend for his frank-
ness. ‘You will understand the impression your first letter made
on me. I could not get it out of my head for a whole week. I
could not forget it. Never mind, your last letter has made
up for it, and I am glad that in losing Mary I have not at the
same time lost my oldest and best friend.’
During the course of the year Engels gave Marx £350,
which was a great deal considering how bad his business was
as a consequence of the cotton crisis. Marx’s mother died at
the end of November, and the legacy was not a large one. It
mitigated at least the worst of Marx’s distress. In May, 1864,
the faithful Wilhelm Wolff died in Manchester and left Marx
£ 800 . From September Engels, who had become a partner
in his firm, w^s able to give him greater financial aid. From
254 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
1864 onwards Marx’s financial position was tolerable and his
freedom from petty cares enabled him to devote himself to his
work. But his anxieties only really ended in 1869, when
Engels sold his share in the cotton mill and was able to make
Marx a definite, if moderate, yearly allowance.
Das Kabital was born in the years of illness and poverty ,
when Marx w as sometimes reduced to t he point ofstarvaj ionj,
He wrote it whi ld harasse d with cares, agonised by hl^child ren’s
distress, tormented by thoughts of the next day. But nothing
could completely overwhelm him. From time To time Engels
urged him to finish the work at last. He knew Marx’s over-
conscientiousness. But Marx went on pruning and filing, and
keeping up-to-date with the latest literature on the subject.
T cannot bring myself to send anything off until I have the
whole before me,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘My writings, whatever
shortcomings they may have, have one characteristic: they
form an artistic whole. In my opinion that is only obtainable
by never letting anything be printed before I see the whole
before my eyes.’
The fair copy of the first volume was completed in March,
1867. Marx, as he wrote to Becker, ‘could throw it at the head
of the bourgeoisie’ at last. Marx read the final proofs on August
16. At two o’clock in the morning he wrote to Engels as
follows: ‘So this volume is finished. Thanks are due to no one
but you for making it possible. Without your self-sacrifice
for me it would be impossible to carry out the three volumes
of this tremendous work. I embrace you, full of thanks. I
greet you, my dear and faithful friend!’
An edition of one thousand copies of Das Kapital appeared
in Hamburg at the beginning of September,
In 1867 Marx wrote to Siegfried Meyer: ‘You must think
very badly of me, the more so when I tell you that your letters
not only gave me great pleasure but were also a real comfort
to me during the painful period during which they came.
Why did I not answer you? Because I was perpetually hover-
ing at the brink of the grave. I therefore had to use every
available moment to work, in order to finish my book, to which
I sacrificed health, happiness and family. I hope this explana-
tion will be sufficient. I laugh at the so-called “practical”
men and their wisdom. If one wants to be an o*, one can easily
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 255
turn one’s back on human suffering and look after one’s own
skin. But I should have regarded myself as really impractical
had I died without finishing my book, at least in manuscript.’
Paul Lafargue says that Marx’s favourite motto was ‘ Travailler
pour Vhumanite ,’ to work for humanity.
The twelve years from 1852 to 1864, from the dissolution of
the Communist League to the foundation of the International,
were filled with journalistic hack-work performed to keep body
and soul together, and with poverty endured for the sake of his
life-work.
Apart from his contacts with Chartists and Urquhartites,
which were so slight that they hardly counted, Marx, who had
been at the very centre of the furious political mttee of the year
of revolution, kept entirely aloof from political activity. Hte
interests were devoted to foreign politics, the war, the Indian
Mutiny, the Anglo-French campaign in China, the trade crisis,
the internal state of France, the anti-slavery movement in
America — events which he could only observe. In the articles
Marx wrote and the correspondence he conducted with Engels
there is little reference to Germany, the land to which the
Communists had paid chief attention in 1847 an d in which
the Communist League had worked under Marx’s leadership.
Marx certainly did not ignore developments in Germany, but
he followed them only incidentally. The revival of the German
workers’ movement was not his work. It happened without
him. It happened against him, through Ferdinand Lassalle.
Lassalle was born in Breslau in 1825. He was the son of
a Jewish business man. He studied Hegelian philosophy in
Berlin and adhered to it in its orthodox, idealistic form
throughout his life. His political position after the middle of
the forties was at the extreme Left wing of democratic radicalism.
He made friends with Marx and became a Communist during
his few weeks of freedom in 1848 — he was in prison until the
middle of August and was re-arrested at the end of October for
inciting to arms against the Crown. When he came out of
prison the JVeue Rheinische £eitung was on its last legs. Marx
and Lassalle did not meet again until the spring of 1861.
They wrote to each other in the meantime. Lassalle was the
more industrious correspondent of the two. He kept Marx
informed of his literary labours — he wrote a portly philosophical
256 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
tome as well as a play — consulted him on political questions,
offered and gladly gave Marx financial help. It was thanks
to his mediation that the Critique was able to appear. He was
the only man in Germany who was loyal to Marx. Marx had
a high opinion of the younger man’s energy and talents, though
from the first he was repelled by his consuming ambition and
his unbounded vanity. If no line remained of all Lassalle’s
writings except a letter of his dating from September, 1845,
it would suffice to explain the human gulf that parted him from
Marx. At the age of twenty Lassalle wrote: ‘So far as I have
power over human nature, I will use it unsparingly. ... I am
the servant and master of ideas, priest of the god who is myself.
I would be a player, a plastic artist, my whole being is the
presence of my will, the expression of the meaning I put into
it. The vibrant tone of my voice and the flashing light of my
eye, every line of my face must reflect the imprint which I put
upon it.’ Lassalle loved theatrical attitudinising, which Marx
detested from the bottom of his heart. He naively placed
personalities as far before causes as Marx did the reverse, and
was utterly careless about what means he chose to achieve his
ends. He was a man who was ready to sacrifice everything for
immediate success. From the first Marx did not completely
trust him. The Cologne Communists refused to admit Lassalle
to the League. But Marx regarded Lassalle as a front-rank
politician and agitator even after personal contact with him
in 1861 and 1862 had enabled him to form a better opinion
of the negative sides of his character than was possible from
letters.
Marx visited Lassalle in Berlin in the spring of 1861. The
Prince Regent of Prussia, the subsequent Emperor William I,
issued an amnesty which made it possible for exiles to return
on certain conditions. Marx, who did not believe he would be
able to hold out much longer in London was thinking of
returning to Germany. Lassalle proposed that Marx should
collaborate with him in publishing a paper. Marx said to
Engels that Lassalle might be very useful under strict super-
vision as a member of an editorial staff; otherwise he could
only be harmful. The plan, however, came to nothing. Marx’s
attempt to re-acquire Prussian nationality, an essential pre-
liminary to assure his being able to remain in Brussia, came
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 257
to nothing too. The police suspected him of Republican or at
any rate of non-Royalist views.
After the passing of the economic crisis in Germany a period
of prosperity set in. The consequence in the political field was
a revival of Liberalism. The Progressive Party in the Chamber
opposed the Government more or less violently, and outside it
tried to win over the ‘fourth estate 5 (the tactical resources of
the bourgeois revolution are very limited and always repeat
themselves). Workers 5 educational associations, founded by
Democratic intellectuals, sprang up on every side. Life revived
in the workers’ movement. Lassalle went to London in the
summer of 1862 and proposed to Marx that the two of them
together place themselves at the head of the new movement.
Marx refused, both on personal and political grounds. He
could not interrupt his work on economics. His personal dis-
taste for Lassalle had developed into a violent aversion.
‘Lassalle is now set up not only as the greatest scholar, the most
profound thinker, the most brilliant of investigators, etc., but
also as a Don Juan and a revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu,
with his everlasting chatter, unnatural falsetto voice, his un-
beautiful demonstrative gestures and his didactic tone on top
of it all. 5 That was how Marx wrote to Engels while Lassalle
was in London, and it was one of the mildest of his utterances.
The political and economic theoretical foundations that
Lassalle proposed for the new workers 5 party were completely
unacceptable to Marx. Lassalle’s party was to start by de-
manding that the state should put capital at the disposal of
the workers to found co-operative societies. Lassalle knew
very well that even if these co-operative societies materialised,
which was more than doubtful, they would at best create a
few enclaves within capitalist economy. Concentrating on the
co-operative movement meant weakening at the outset the
proletarian struggle which had only just begun. Marx foresaw
that Lassalle, ‘like every man who believes he has a panacea
for the sufferings of the masses in his pocket, will give his
agitation the character of a religious sect. 5 Lassalle put the
Chartist demand for universal suffrage on his programme side
by side with the demand for state aid. ‘He overlooked the
fact that conditions in Germany and England were entirely
different, 5 MarA later wrote. ‘He overlooked the lessons of
17
258 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
the bas empire concerning universal suffrage.’ In London
Lassalle did not mention the over-cunning tactics he had
prepared for leading the workers’ movement and started to
apply as soon as he returned to Germany.
Lassalle conducted his propaganda in speech and writing
from 1862 until his early death in the late summer of 1864.
His speeches \vere brilliant, his pamphlets magnificently
written. He did in fact create a German workers’ party. The
General Union of German Workers was founded in May, 1863.
But before it started its existence Lassalle had started to
negotiate with Bismarck.
The conflict between the Prime Minister of Prussia and the
Progressive majority in the Chamber was becoming more and
more acute. Anything or anybody likely to damage them was
welcome to Bismarck, even a Socialist and Jewish agitator
like Lassalle, for whom the Prussian Junker would otherwise
not have had much use. Most of the workers who were at all
politically awake adhered to the Progressives. Lassallc’s first
task was necessarily to part them from the bourgeoisie. That the
Liberal opposition would be temporarily weakened as a result
was not of great importance. For once the workers’ party was
formed it would have to fight not only the Liberal bourgeoisie
but the incomparably more resolute militaristic monarchists.
Bismarck was aware of this. In making a compact with
Lassalle he acted like a power coming to terms with a party
which might be a power in the future, but for the time being
was only a pawn on the chess-board next to other and more
powerful pieces. Bismarck did not betray his class, but
Lassalle nearly betrayed the workers’ movement to Bismarck.
How far Lassalle went with Bismarck Marx never knew as long
as Lassalle lived, and even after his death he never learned the
whole truth. It did not come to light until an old cupboard
in the room of the Prime Minister of Prussia was opened in
1927. It contained the letters exchanged between Bismarck
and Lassalle. The Workers’ Union was so organised that its
president, who of course was Lassalle himself, ruled over it
like a dictator. Lassalle was justified in calling it his ‘kingdom.’
He was able to show Bismarck how gladly the workers subjected
themselves to a dictatorship when they saw that it was working
in their interests, and even how ready they woflld be to honour
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT OF EXILE 259
the king as the Socialist dictator. Lassalle believed in Real-
politik , which meant, in Marx’s words, that he only admitted
as real what was immediately in front of his nose. In this case
what was in front of his nose was the good-will of the Govern-
ment in its fight with the Progressives about the independent
workers’ party. The workers were to start establishing their
independence by renouncing it to the party of Reaction.
Lassalle was on the point of turning the General Union of
German Workers into a small auxiliary corps of feudal reaction
against the bourgeoisie. Even his state-aid slogan prompted
him to seek Bismarck’s friendship. Lassalle told the workers
that if only the State helped, the co-operative societies could be
formed at once. That State was the existing State, the Prussian
monarchy. Lassalle, by limiting the proletarian struggle to
one small aim, was bound to compromise with the rulers of
Prussia, for it was they and not some power in the dim and
distant future who were to help.
It was impossible for Marx in London to know how deeply
Lassalle was involved with Bismarck. Lassalle believed he
could outmanoeuvre Bismarck, but was in fact outmanoeuvred
by him. Lassalle sought Bismarck’s help — only temporarily,
of course, for as long as he should need it against the Pro-
gressives, after which, when it was no more needed, he would
free himself from his powerful patron. But in fact this strange
alliance only resulted in his increasingly becoming Bismarck’s
tool. Marx could not possibly know the full extent of Lassalle’s
deviation. Nevertheless he followed Lassalle’s agitation with
the most extreme suspicion. It became clear that he would
have to oppose the fatal tendencies of the new movement.
Marx broke off personal relations with Lassalle in 1862.
Lassalle still sent Marx his pamphlets, but without a line of
greeting. Marx found nothing in them but unskilful plagiarism
of the Communist Manifesto and his later works, which
Lassalle knew very well. Marx never replied.
In spite of all his deficiencies and mistakes, his compromises
and his manoeuvres, in spite of his dictatorial attitude, which
was fundamentally inimical to the workers’ movement, in spite
of the limitations of his economic insight, Lassalle has the
immortal merit of having revived the workers’ movement in
Germany. Thj creed of Lassalle remained that of a sect.
260 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
After some vacillations and hesitations the German proletariat
followed another route to that which Lassalle showed them.
On August 30, 1864, Lassalle was killed in a non-political
duel. Four weeks later the International Working Men’s
Association was founded in London.
CHAPTER XVII
THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING MEN’S
ASSOCIATION
In the long years of exile Marx had so consistently declined to
associate himself with any sort of political organisation that he
felt that the change of attitude indicated by the appearance of
his name on the list of founders of a new international workers’
organisation in the autumn of 1864 required an explanation to
his friends and sympathisers. On November 29, 1864, he wrote
to his old friend Weydemeyer that he had consented ‘because
it is an affair in which it is possible to do important work.’
The initiative for the formation of the new organisation had
come from men who were leaders of really active mass-organisa-
tions. That was the factor that distinguished it from its
predecessors, and it was the decisive factor in causing Marx to
abandon his customary aloofness. He saw its negative sides
plainly enough. He was only too well aware of its hetero-
geneous nature and the wavering and unclear political views
of many of those who were at the back of it. Nevertheless he
joined it. T knew that this time real “forces” were at work
both on the London and the Paris sides,’ he explained to Engels
on November 4, ‘and that was the reason why I decided to
depart from my otherwise inflexible rule to decline any such
invitations.’ Engels approved of both Marx’s decision and
Marx’s reasons. It was necessary, he said, to be guided by the
‘real circumstances.’ To accept contact with the active leaders
of a real movement was their duty. ‘It is good that we should
once more be coming into contact with people who at least
represent their class. After all, that is the main thing in the
end,’ he wrote.
It was indeed the main thing. The immediate future demon-
strated what a huge sphere of activity the new organisation
opened up for Marx. The new organisation was the ‘Inter-
national Working Men’s Association,’ which was so soon
destined to become famous and is known to-day as the First-
International.# A new epoch in the history of the workers’
261
262
KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
movement and in Marx’s life began with its foundation. The
‘sleepless night of exile’ was over, and with it the loneliness and
isolation from active, practical life. Marx became once more,
for the second time in his life, the organiser of the political
struggle of the working class.
At the beginning of the sixties there was an upsurge of the
workers’ movement not only in Germany, as has already been
mentioned, but 'also in England and in France, the two
countries which took the chief part in the formation of the
International Working Men’s Association. After a decade of
apathy and paralysis, in which the active struggle of the pro-
letariat was practically at a standstill, the workers once more
took up the weapon of the strike and showed a new tendency
'to organise. The workers in France had different traditions
and fought under different conditions from those of the
workers in England, and their principles and practice neces-
sarily differed, but on both sides of the Channel they sooner
or later realised that without independent organisations of
their own they must necessarily remain impotent. Even if
theoretical clarity were sometimes wanting, experience in the
end compelled it.
French and English very soon saw that it would be necessary
to get together. There were two outstanding reasons for this.
The strike movement, which assumed particularly large
dimensions in England, demanded a close entente cordiale with
the workers of the other country, from which the employers
attempted to import strike-breakers. In addition there arose
at this time a whole series of international questions in which
French and English workers must make common cause.
The first contacts between English and French workers were
made in 1862. The great World Exhibition took place in
London in that year. It was visited by a delegation of French
workers. The idea of this visit arose in Bonapartist circles
which nourished a ‘Caesarian Socialism’ of their own and aimed
at propitiating the workers with the Empire. They had the
support of the Emperor’s cousin, Prince Napoleon, the so-called
‘Plon-Plon,’ who saw to it that the workers were allowed to
form their own organisations in the factories to elect their
delegates and raise funds to finance the journey. Such a ‘legal
opportunity’ had of course to be exploited. Among those who
THE INTERNATIONAL 263
took part in the electoral campaign and were elected to the
delegation were men who had inaugurated an independent
workers 5 movement in France. Many other delegates were in-
evitably Bonapartists to a greater or less degree, but the
representatives of the most active English workers 5 associations
were not represented on the London committee formed to
welcome the French delegation either. The London committee
owed its formation to moderate Liberal Members of Parliament
and equally moderate men of the co-operative movement —
people who represented the extreme Right wing of the workers 5
movement and took their stand on the principle of class peace,
with which the speeches made at the meeting of welcome on
August 5, 1862, were in entire conformity. The English
speakers declared that ‘good understanding between oui
employers and ourselves is the only way to smooth the diffi-
culties by which we are at present surrounded. 5
The meeting was really tame, with unctuous speeches and
love, friendship and fraternal kisses. Festival of harmony
though it was, with it the history of the ‘Red International 5
begins. Apart from the beautiful ceremonies, the independent
French delegates met the young English trade union leaders,
entirely unfeted, and sowed the first seeds of the Anglo-French
workers 5 alliance, the fruits of which manifested themselves
in the following year.
The old sympathy for Poland and the old hatred of Russian
absolutism were still alive in England and France. Both drew
fresh strength from the Polish rising of 1863. The workers in
both countries demanded intervention on Poland’s behalf.
Petitions to Napoleon bore hundreds of signatures, and a huge
workers 5 meeting in England sent a deputation to the Prime
Minister. The French Emperor declined to receive the
workers, but Prince Napoleon gave them to understand that
France would like to intervene, in fact it would prefer to do
so to-day rather than to-morrow, but unfortunately action
was hampered by English sabotage. On the English side
Palmerston deplored the impossibility of stepping in on Poland’s
behalf, however much he would have liked to have done so,
because France, unfortunately, insisted on standing aside.
Then there arose a plan for a joint Anglo-French pro-Polish
demonstration* It took place in London on July 22, 1863.
264 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
A special delegation came from Paris, and this time it consisted
exclusively of adherents of the independent workers’ movement.
The demonstration failed in its purpose, if for no other reason
than that by this time the Polish rising was on the verge of
collapse. But before the French delegates left England a
decision had been made which was destined to be of great
historical importance. They and the representatives of the
English workers ‘agreed in principle to the foundation of an
international association of workers and elected a committee to
do the work preparatory to an inaugural meeting. The pre-
liminaries dragged on for more than a year, ‘addresses’ were
exchanged about the duties of the future association, manifestoes
were drafted, and finally the inaugural meeting took place in
*St. Martin’s Hall, Long Acre, on September 28, 1864.
Marx took no part in the preliminary work. He read about
the meeting of July 22, 1863, in the newspapers, followed the
course of the Polish rising with passionate interest, became
indignant at the attitude of British diplomacy, and was con-
sidering writing a pamphlet on the Polish question. The
Anglo-French workers’ demonstration could not possibly have
escaped his notice. But he had no direct contact with the
organisers of the meeting and knew nothing of the preparatory
work that was quietly going on. He only heard of the organisers’
plans a week before the inaugural meeting. A young French
exile, Le Lubez, a Republican, was the contact man between
the French workers and the English trade unionists, and he told
Marx who were at the back of the movement and what their
intentions were and invited him to take part in the meeting
as the representative of the German workers. Marx recognised
that this was a serious undertaking and accepted the invitation.
Marx suggested his friend Eccarius, an old member of the
Communist League, as spokesman for the Germans and he
himself ‘assisted as a silent figure on the platform.’
The meeting was a complete success. The big hall was
filled to the point of suffocation. Speeches were made by
Frenchmen, Englishmen, Italians and Irish. An unanimous
resolution was passed to found an International Working
Men’s Association, with headquarters in London, and a
committee was elected to draft the programme and statutes.
Marx was elected a member of this committee. «
THE INTERNATIONAL 265
The committee was far too big. It had fifty-five members,
of whom twenty-seven were English. These were mainly trade
union leaders. Of the rest the French and Germans had nine
representatives each, and the Italians, the Swiss and the Poles
two each. The majority of the non-English members were
Emigres. Politically the committee was heterogeneous, including
as it did old Chartists and Owenites, Blanquists and followers
of Proudhon, Polish Democrats and adherents of Mazzini.
Its social composition, however, was far more uniform. Workers
formed the preponderating majority.
In these circumstances it was not very easy to agree on the
fundamental aims of the association, its programme and its
statutes. Marx was unable to take part in the committee
meetings during the first few weeks, partly because he was ill,
partly for the simple reason that the invitations never reached
him. In the meantime the committee asked Weston, an old
Owenite, to draw up a draft programme, a task to which he
devoted himself with the most righteous zeal, pondering over
each sentence for weeks at a time. The task of translating the
statutes of the Italian workers’ association, which it was
intended to make the basis of the associations’ own statutes,
devolved upon Major Wolff, Mazzini’s secretary. When the
two finally laid the fruit of their labours before the committee,
its inadequacy was patent even to the least exacting. Weston’s
exposition, in Marx’s opinion and everybody else’s too, was
Tull of the most extreme confusion and unspeakably verbose.’
His suggested statutes were more impossible still. Mazzini
repudiated the class-struggle and believed in solving the
problems of modern industrial society with sentimental phrases
of the kind that had been the fashion in the thirties. The old
Carbonaro, who had been the leader of the movement for
national liberation in Italy for generations, placed the national
question above all else and could conceive of no method of
organisation other than that of the Carbonari. The Italian
workers’ organisations which adhered to him were nothing but
benefit societies founded to help in the national struggle.
Apart from its other shortcomings, the Italian draft was ren-
dered impossible by the fact that, in Marx’s words, ‘it aimed
at something quite impossible, a kind of central government
of the Europe^ working class (of course with Mazzini in the
266
KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
background).’ The committee gave both drafts to Le Lubez
to revise. The result was, if possible, worse than ever. Le
Lubez presented his text at a committee meeting on October
1 8, the first that Marx attended. Marx, as he wrote to Engels,
‘was really shocked as he listened to good Le Lubez’s frightfully
phrased, badly written and entirely ill-considered preamble,
pretending to be a declaration of principles, with Mazzini
peeping out through every word, and encrusted as it was with
vague scraps of French Socialism.’ Marx made ‘gentle’
opposition and succeeded in having Le Lubez’s draft passed
to a sub-committee to be revised again.
Marx now got to work himself. He summed up the sub-
committee’s duties in his own characteristic way. It was
decided ‘if possible not to leave a single line of the thing
standing.’ The sub-committee left him a free hand. In place
of the declaration of principles Marx wrote an ‘Address to the
Working Glasses.’ The only thing it had in common with the
draft was the title of ‘statutes.’ ‘It is very difficult,’ he wrote to
Engels, ‘to manage the thing in such a way as to make our views
appear in a form which make them acceptable to the workers’
movement at its present standpoint. Time is required to give
the re-awakened movement its old boldness of speech. Fortiter
in re , suaviter in modo is what is required.’
The sub-committee accepted Marx’s proposals, and only
added a few moralising phrases. These were so placed ‘that
they could not do any harm.’ The ‘inaugural address’ was
unanimously and enthusiastically accepted at a meeting of the
general committee. The ‘International’ had its constitution,
and now it started its work.
The fundamental idea of the inaugural address and of the
statutes was expressed in the phrase: ‘ The emancipation o f
the working class must be the work of the wor king-class itself.’
The International served this aim by founding proletarian
mass-organisations and uniting them in joint activity. Point i
of the statutes said: ‘This association was founded in order
to create a central means of unity and co-operation between
the associations of workers which already exist in the various
countries and aim at the same goal, namely, the protection,
the rise and the complete emancipation of the working
class.’ The International left complete freedom to its various
THE INTERNATIONAL
267
national sections as to the form their organisation might take,
and refrained from prescribing any definite methods of con-
ducting the struggle. Only one thing did it rigorously insist
on. That was the absolute independence of the member-
organisations. The inaugural address also demonstrated from
the experience of the English workers that the ‘capture of
political power has become the great duty of the working class.’
The inaugural address and the statutes are typical of the
work Marx did for the International in the five following years.
Marx saw it to be his duty to educate the masses, and gradually
and carefully, but firmly and surely lead them towards a definite
goal. The groundwork of all his labour was a profound belief
in the sound instinct of the proletarian mass-movement. Bitter
experience in the years of revolution and still more in the years
of exile had convinced him that it was necessary to keep aloof
from all intermediary groups, especially organisations of exiles.
He had also become convinced that great workers’ organisations,
able to develop freely within their own country, associated with
the class movement as a whole, would find the right way in
the end, however much they might vacillate and go astray.
The inaugural address and the statutes and Marx’s work in
the International were founded on the sound instinct of the
proletarian movement. The task that Marx set before his eyes
was to help it, bring it to awareness and theoretical compre-
hension of that which it must do and of the experiences through
which it must pass.
As Marx said, his old ultra-Left opponents in the forties had
made the same error as Proudhon, the error into which Lassalle
also fell. They did not seek, in Marx’s words, ‘the right basis
for agitation in real conditions, but wanted to prescribe the
course of the latter by certain doctrinal recipes.’ Marx sought
its basis in the forms of the movement which life itself created.
He avoided giving prescriptions. That does not of course mean
that he let things take their own course. What he did rather
was to help every movement to get clear about itself, to come
to an understanding of the connections between its particular
interests and the whole, of how its special aims could only
be realised by the realisation of the demands of the whole
class, by the complete emancipation of the proletariat. An
excellent example of Marx’s tactics in the International was
268
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
the way the inaugural address dealt with the co-operative
societies. The co-operative movement was important at the
time, and its influence was not always to the advantage of
the workers’ movement as a whole. The idea of independent
co-operation was not seldom substituted for the idea of the
class-struggle. Protection of the workers, the trade-union
struggle, and even the downfall of capitalist society seemed
superfluous, if hot actually noxious to many, who believed
the co-operative movement capable of emancipating the
working class. Marx did not attack the co-operative societies
outright. By so doing he would have alienated from the
International the groups of workers who adhered to the co-
operative ideal. He said that the value of the great social
experiment represented by the co-operative movement could
not be over-estimated. The co-operatives, particularly the
co-operative factories, had demonstrated that large-scale pro-
duction, production in harmony with modern scientific
developments, was possible without the existence of a class of
entrepreneurs employing a class of ‘hands.’ The co-operative
societies represented a victory of the political economy of the
working class over the political economy of ownership. But
experience had also demonstrated that, in spite of the excellence
of their principles and their usefulness in practice, the co-
operative societies were confronted with limits which they could
not overstep. The co-operative movement, to save the working
masses, must be developed on a national scale and consequently
be promoted by national measures. Thus the adherent of the
co-operative ideal was forced to the conclusion that he who
wanted co-operative enterprise must necessarily desire the
capture of political power by the working class.
The fundamental idea of the inaugural address and of the
whole of Marx’s activity in the International was that the
■ workers, acting on the basis of ‘real conditions,’ which of course
I differed in every single country, must create independent
parties, take part in the political and social life of their country
^and so make the proletariat ripe for the capture of political
power.
In the General Council, as the committee elected at the
inaugural meeting soon came to be called, Marx was the
acknowledged leader. The work to be done »was more than
THE INTERNATIONAL 269
ample. The magnitude of the need that the International
fulfilled and the timeliness of its foundation were proved by its
extraordinarily rapid growth. On February 23, 1865, Marx
wrote to Kugelmann that the success of the International in
London, Paris, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy had exceeded
all expectations. On April 15 — six months after the meeting
in St. Martin’s Hall — he wrote to one of the leaders of the
Belgian section that there were more than twelve thousand
members in England. Inquiries, suggestions, requests showered
in upon the General Council from all sides. News of new
sections being formed poured in. All sorts of questions con-
cerning matters of organisation, inevitable in the case of any
big new body, continually cropped up. ‘The French, particu-
larly the Paris workers, regard the London Council as a regular'
workers’ government for foreign affairs,’ Marx wrote to Engels
at the beginning of March, 1865. The General Council, and
in most cases that meant Marx, had to give instructions and
advice and answer inquiries and incessantly take up positions
towards political and economic events. Marx complained to
Engels in the middle of March, 1865, that the International
took up an enormous amount of his time, because he was in
effect the head of the whole affair. He gave an example of
how he had recently been occupied. On February 28 he had
had a meeting with the Frenchmen, Tolain and Fribourg,
who had come from Paris. The meeting, which lasted till
twelve o’clock at night, was in conjunction with an evening
meeting, at which he had to sign two hundred membership
cards. On March 1 there was a Polish meeting. On March 4
a meeting of the sub-committee dealing with the French
question lasted till one o’clock in the morning; on March 6
another meeting also lasted till one o’clock in the morning;
on March 7 a meeting of the General Council lasted till
midnight. ‘Well, mon cher> que faireV Marx wrote. Tf you
have said “A” it follows that you go on and say “B.”’ Marx
often grumbled, but never missed a meeting of the General
Council. If at first it had seemed that the pressure of work
was only going to be so great at the beginning, the belief soon
turned out to be illusory. It very soon became clear that the
demands the International made on Marx were going to in-
crease with evary month. One question gave rise to two others.
27O KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
It was inevitable and right that it should be so. The Inter-
national developed, not according to a system, but according
to the inner logic of the movement, according to the Teal
conditions. 5
In the case of internal questions within the organisation
Marx declined to exercise pressure, and he insisted that the
General Council adopt a strictly above-party attitude in all
disputes between the various groups. ‘Whom they have for
a leader is their business and not mine, 5 he said on the occasion
of an internal German dispute in 1868. At the beginning of
1865, when violent disputes arose between a group of workers,
led by Tolain and Fribourg, who took their stand by Proudhon,
and another, led by Lefort and Le Lubez, who were Republi-
cans and Socialists, Marx made every effort to compose the
dispute and keep both parties in the International.
The International had no programme if by ‘programme 5 is
meant a single, concrete, detailed system. Marx had inten-
tionally made the statutes so wide as to make it possible for all
Socialist groups to join. An announcement in the spring of
1870 declared that it was not the duty of the General Council
to express a theoretical opinion on the programme of individual
sections. Its only duty was to see that they contained nothing
inconsistent with the letter and the spirit of the statutes. Marx,
in his pamphlet on the apparent rifts in the International
written in 1872, again emphasised that the International
admitted to its organs and its congresses all of Socialist views
without any exceptions whatever.
It must not be concluded that Marx’s toleration of all the
political lines of thought represented in the International
meant that he abandoned his own critical attitude. His letters,
especially those to Engels, contain the severest judgments on
the confused mentalities with whom he had to deal. The
illness from which he suffered during the first few years that
followed the foundation of the International did nothing to
make his mood milder; and in fact a good many of the things
the sections did were more than a little trying. What is re-
markable is not that Marx grumbled to his friends about the
Proudhonists and the rest but the consistency and pertinacity
with which he maintained his attitude and the restraint with
which he tolerated all the conflicts that were bcund to arise in
THE INTERNATIONAL
271
the young movement. It was not infrequent for him actually
to defend a group on some internal matter whose programme,
if what they stood for can be dignified with such an expression,
he contemptuously dismissed in private letters.
Tolerant as Marx was towards the various under-currents
within the workers’ movement, he resolutely fought all attempts
to anchor the International to the programme of any single
group or take away its character as a class movement. It was
on the latter question that the first conflict arose. Mazzini’s
followers demanded the deletion from the inaugural address
and the statutes of certain passages which emphasised the class-
character of the International. The General Council emphati-
cally refused. The Italian Workers’ Union in London, which
had been founded and set going by followers of Mazzini, 1
broke with its ‘fathers.’ This was the first victory of the
‘Internationalists’ in their long struggle with Mazzini. An
echo of it is the judgment of Marx made by Mazzini years
later. ‘ Marx,’ he said, ‘a Germ an, a man of penetrating but^
corruptin g intelligenc e, imperious, jealous of the influence of
oHie^TaSing^strong p hilosop hic or religi ous convictions, has,
I fear, mor cjiaixed^if^righteou s hatre d, in his hea rt than love/
The struggle with the followers of Mazzini was but a small
prelude to the far more important struggle between Proud-
honists and Collectivists which filled the whole first period
of the International up to 1869.
During the first years of the International its main support
came from English and French workers’ organisations. There
was a fundamental difference in the nature and political
outlook of the two.
England was economically the most advanced country in
the world. Big industry had developed more rapidly in England
than anywhere else, and for this reason class-contradictions
were pronounced and the workers’ movement on a relatively
high level. The workers were able users of the weapon of the
strike. Just at the time when the International arose one wave
of strikes after another swept across the country. At the begin-
ning of the sixties flourishing trade unions developed from
the benefit societies they had hitherto mainly been into fighting
organisations raising their own strike funds. They constituted
the most important group within the International. The
272 KARL MARX*. MAN AND FIGHTER
number of organisations formally associated with the Inter-
national was not large. Even the London Trades Council,
one of the most resolute bodies in the trade union movement,
did not accept the InternationaPs invitation to join. But some
trade unions did join the International and were on its member-
ship list. From the beginning British trade union leaders had
an important voice on the General Council. Interested in
immediate, practical results, they were utterly indifferent to
theoretical questions and the ultimate aims of the International
as Marx conceived them. They understood very well the
importance of working-class legislation, upon which, under
Marx’s influence, the International laid great stress. But they
preferred conducting the struggle for it, like the struggle for
electoral reform, through the channel of Liberal and Radical
Members of Parliament rather than as an independent party.
Among them there were always a few who insisted that the
movement must not assume an explicit class-character. But
so far as the day-to-day struggle of the proletariat was con-
cerned the young English trade union leaders had incomparably
more experience than all the workers 5 leaders of the Continent
combined. The main thing that interested them in the
International was the possibility of using it for gaining vic-
tories in strikes. They were attracted by the possibility of
making the International use its connections with countries
abroad to prevent the introduction of foreign strike-breakers,
which was a favourite expedient of the employers at the
time. Fribourg, one of the founders of the International, said
that the English regarded the International purely as an
organisation from which the strike movement could receive
great assistance.
France was far behind England in the industrial respect.
In France the handicraftsman was still supreme, particularly
in Paris, with its art and luxury trades. It was natural enough
that many of the leaders of the movement in France should be
followers of Proudhon, whose teaching expressed the interests
of the small independent artisan or trader, the small business
man and the peasant. The ‘mutualists, 5 as the followers of
Proudhon described themselves at the time, demanded*cheap
credit, assured markets, co-operative societies and the same
measures that hard-pressed master-craftsmens have always
THE INTERNATIONAL
273
demanded everywhere. To most of them the slogan of the
collectivisation of the means of production sounded absurd,
unjust and evil. Hence also they were in favour of peaceful,
gradual development, and they flatly repudiated revolutionary
methods. From his point of view Fribourg regarded the
International as an instrument ‘for aiding the proletariat in
legally, pacifically and morally gaining the place in the sun of
civilisation to which it is entitled.’ They had* very little trust in
legislation or state measures for the working classes, and they
regarded strikes as extremely dangerous, though sometimes in-
evitable; in any case as always undesirable. Varlin, one of the
leaders of the International in Paris, who fell in the bloody week
of May, 1871, declared as late as 1868 that the International
repudiated strikes as an anti-economic weapon. The mutualists
wanted an International which should occupy itself with
investigating the position of the workers, cause alterations in
the labour market and thrash out these problems theoretically.
Marx saw the weaknesses of the mutualists and of the English
trade unions alike. He did not have a particularly high
opinion of the trade union leaders. He said later that he
regarded some of them with suspicion from the first, as careerists
in whose devotion to the working-class cause he found it
difficult to believe. But in relation to the immediate tasks of
the International, the tactics of the day-to-day struggle, he
stood far nearer the Englishmen than the Proudhonists.
‘The gentlemen in Paris, 5 he wrote to Kugelmann in 1866, ‘had
their heads full of Proudhon’s emptiest phrases. They chatter
of science, knowing nothing of it. They scorn all revolutionary
action, i.e. which springs from the class-struggle itself, all con-
centrated social movement, that is to say movement realisable
by political means (for example, the legal shortening of the
working day).’
In spite of all his dislike of Proudhonist phraseology, Marx
stuck to his tactics. In drafting the agenda for the first Con-
gress of the International in 1 866 he took pains to avoid anything
that might have given rise to general theoretical discussions,
and he confined the programme ‘to points which permitted of
immediate accord and immediate concerted action of the
workers, corresponded directly to the needs of the class-struggle
and the class organisation of the workers, and at the same time
18
274 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
spurred the workers on. 5 The strike question was certainly a
question of the moment, but Marx did not put it upon the
agenda as such but in the form of ‘international assistance for
the struggle of Labour with Capital. 5 He wished to avoid
alienating the Proudhonists. He instructed the London dele-
gates not to discuss the usefulness or the reverse of strikes but to
put in the foreground the struggle with the strike-breakers,
which the Proudhonists could not repudiate.
It was not Marx and his followers but the Proudhonists who
opened the fray. The Proudhonists wanted to anchor the
International to their own system. The most important thing
to them was not those things on which all were agreed but their
own particular hobby-horse, their ‘mutualism. 5 The first
Congresses took place in Latin Switzerland, for which reason
the majority of the delegates came from western Switzerland
and adjacent France, i.e. from the areas where the Proudhonists
predominated. At the Lausanne Congress of 1867 they were
fairly successful. The representatives of the General Council
were not sufficiently prepared — Marx was busy at the time
with the publication of Das Kapital and was not present. But
their success was their own downfall. At a time when the strike
movement was constantly extending and affecting even France
and western Switzerland, the rejection of the strike-weapon
was going too far even for many of the Proudhonists. There
was a rift, which soon spread to other questions too.
The Proudhonists were the first to bring up for discussion of
the fundamental question of the socialisation of the means of
production. At the Congress of 1867 they raised the question
of the socialisation of the means of transport. At the time the
railways were using their monopoly to favour big industry at
the expense of the small producer. So the principal opponents
of collectivisation decided that an exception must be made in
the case of the railways, which must be collectivised. Very
well, their opponents replied, why stop at collectivisation of
the means of transport? To their horror and alarm the
Proudhonists saw opponents rising within their own ranks.
Young heretics, led by Cesar de Paepe, a Belgian, arose among
the orthodox and tried hard to reconcile their mutualist doc-
trines with the ideal of collectivisation. This breakdown on
the part of the Proudhonists assured the success of the collectivist
THE INTERNATIONAL 275
idea in the International. The Young Proudhonists became
more enthusiastic about collectivisation than anyone, and it
was thanks to them that the International carrle out for
collectivism in its official resolutions. In 1868 Marx was still
opposed to declarations of principle on such critical questions.
‘It is better not to make any general resolutions, 5 he wrote to his
closest colleagues, Eccarius and Lessner, who represented the
General Council at the Congress of 1 868. It was only in the last
stages of the debates on collectivisation that Marx intervened.
He drafted the resolutions on the nationalisation of the soil
which were accepted by the Bale Congress of 1869.
Marx, who in other respects demonstrated the most extreme
tolerance, only abandoned his restraint when the problem of
political struggle arose acutely within the International and he*
began to feel that, unknown to it, something had formed behind
the scenes, something that aimed quite systematically at forcing
the International in a direction which was completely un-
acceptable to him and, after the experiences he had had, he was
convinced would be injurious to the workers 5 movement.
Everybody in the International had been agreed from the
start that the workers must take an active part in the political
struggle. The English trade unionists naturally supported the
movement for the extension of the franchise in every way they
could. Those Proudhonists who had co-operated in the foun-
dation of the International were all in favour of taking part in
the political struggle, and would have regarded any discussion
of the advisability of doing so as a sheer waste of time. Their
leading Paris group had originated out of an attempt to set
up an independent workers 5 candidate in 1864, and Proudhon
himself had given his enthusiastic consent to this step in his
work, written shortly before his death, De la Capacite Politique
des Classes Ouvriires. The German workers 5 movement — though
it had played no great role in the inner life of the International
it had a notable influence upon the development of its ideas —
fought, as Lassalle had taught it, for universal suffrage. Even
the Swiss ‘Internationalists 5 took part in the elections as a
matter of course. The Lausanne Congress of 1867 passed a
resolution — the minority was only two — to the effect that
the conquest of political power was an absolute necessity
for the working class. This was the Congress at which the
276 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Proudhonists were in a majority, and among those who voted
for the resolution were many who were later among the most
resolute opponents of any political activity whatever.
The situation altered pretty quickly. In 1867 and 1868 the
International made extraordinary progress. The economic
crisis which was setting in intensified social antagonisms, and
one strike after another broke out in the countries of Western
Europe. The International very soon proved a useful instru-
ment in the direct economic struggle of the proletariat. It
succeeded in many cases in preventing the introduction of
strike-breakers from abroad, and, in cases where foreign workers
did strike-breaking work without knowing it, succeeded in
causing them to practise solidarity. In other cases it organised
ihe raising of funds for the relief of strikers. This not only
gave the latter moral support but caused real panic among
the employers, who no longer had to deal with ‘their own’
workers alone but with a new and sinister power, an international
organisation which apparently had resources at its disposal with
which the individual employer could not compete. Often the
mere rumour that the International was going to intervene in
a strike was sufficient to cause the employers to grant all the
workers’ demands. In its panic the reactionary Press ex-
aggerated the power of the International beyond all bounds,
but this only resulted in enhancing the respect in which it was
held by the working class. Every strike, whether it succeeded
or not, resulted in all the strikers joining the International, the
Conservative, E. Villetard, wrote in 1872 in his history of the
International. In those years it often happened that the whole
of the workers at a factory would join the International together.
No government repressive measures, arrests or trials succeeded
in stemming the movement’s advance; they merely served to
drive the workers into the revolutionary camp and strengthen
the International thereby. Its sections seemed to spring up
like mushrooms. At the 1866 Congress only four countries
were represented — England, France, Germany and Switzerland
— but at the Congress of 1 869 there were nine, America, Austria,
Belgium, Spain and Italy being the newcomers. Individual
sections had arisen in Hungary, Holland, Algiers, South
America and elsewhere. Because of big fluctuations and the
weak development on the organisational side it is difficult to
THE INTERNATIONAL 277
establish how many members the International really had.
Eight hundred thousand workers were formally associated with
the International in any case. At the Internat/onal trial in
Paris the public prosecutor, who had access to the papers of
the French section, stated that there were four hundred and
forty-three thousand members in France alone. At the Bale
Congress of 1869 the English claimed two hundred and thirty
sections with ninety-five thousand members. In Belgium in
the summer of that year there were more than two hundred
sections with sixty-four thousand members. The membership
of the workers 5 organisations which declared their solidarity
with the International was greater by far. The International
was acknowledged in 1869 by the English Trades Union
Congress, in 1869 by the Nurnberg Congress of German
Workers 5 Educational Unions, in 1868 by the Association of
German Workers 5 Unions in Austria, in the same year by the
Neuchatel Congress of German Workers 5 Educational Unions
in Switzerland, in 1869 by the American Labour Union, etc.
Testut, who wrote his history of the International on the basis
of police reports, estimated its number of members as five
millions, and the newspapers of the International actually put
the figure as high as seven millions. These figures are, of
course, utterly fantastic. But the Hite of the European pro-
letariat adhered to the International. In the last third of the
sixties it had become a power to be reckoned with.
At the same time political questions developed from
theoretical propositions to be discussed at Congresses into
practical questions requiring a practical answer. The two
groups within the German workers 5 movement, the followers
of Lassalle and the ‘Eisenacher, 5 were the first to take part,
in 1867, in the North German Parliamentary elections. In
1867 and 1868, after the extension of the suffrage to workers
having a house of their own, the English labour movement
prepared to enter the electoral fray. In 1 869 the French workers
set up their own candidates in many places. The International
now had to decide what attitude to take up to other parties, and
to elections. The weak organisation of the sections and the
political inexperience of their leaders made mistakes and
differences of opinion inevitable as soon as the question of
voting becamje an actual one, and this lead to a reaction. A
278 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
section arose who opposed participating in elections and
‘politics’ as a whole.
In Latin fWtzerland the Internationalists made particularly
grave mistakes. The pioneer of the International there was
Dr. P. Coullery, an old Democrat who had long been interested
in social problems. He was an official of the Radical party,
had a high reputation, and represented it as deputy to the
cantonal legislative council. Dr. Coullery founded the first
section of the International in Latin Switzerland in 1865, and
worked for the extension of the International in the western
cantons, and in 1867 his paper, La Voix de V Avenir, became the
chief organ of the section of that area. His activity on behalf
of the International led to a rupture with the radicals. When
he became a candidate for the office of juge de paix in La Chaux
des Fonds the radicals opposed him. That induced the Con-
servatives to vote for Coullery, and it was due to their aid that
he was elected. By the election of 1868 Coullery’s rapprochement
to the Conservatives had proceeded so far that he actually
made a regular pact with them. The local Press called it
7 a coalition aristo-socialiste .’ The list of candidates went under
the name of the International, but on it the names of members
of the International were next to those of extreme Conserva-
tives. Other sections of the International in western Switzer-
land protested violently against this policy, particularly the
section at Locle. Its founder and leader was a young school-
master, James Guillaume, who was later a very prominent
member of the anti-Marxist group in the International. He
was a former member of the Radical party, and he and his
group, which had started as the ‘Jeunesse Radicale,’ continued
to support the Radicals in local questions. The slogan in the
fight against Coullery was: ‘The International keeps out of
political strife 5 ; which in this case was equivalent to support
of the Radicals. Gradually the Locle group generalised their
views and ended by absolutely repudiating the policy of
participating in elections. Coullery, it maintained, was bound
to err, to compromise the International, as was anybody who
participated in elections. Coullery’s tactics had, of course,
nothing whatever in common with the tactical line of Marx.
Marx always vigorously opposed any coalition of the revolu-
tionary proletariat with the reactionaries against the bourgeois
THE INTERNATIONAL 2 79
Democrats. When Lassalle’s followers started openly practising
this policy, which Lassalle himself initiated, Marx publicly
and ruthlessly broke with them. What Marx dem^fided of the
workers 5 parties was that they should criticise the Government
and the reactionaries no less severely than they did the bour-
geois Democrats.
The Locle group of ‘Internationalists 5 formed the kernel of
the later anti-authoritative faction, whose struggle against the
General Council led to the split and the downfall of the
International. Its leader was Michael Alexandrovich Bakunin.
CHAPTER XVIII
MICHAEL BAKUNIN
Bakunin was born in 1814 in the Government of Tver. He
was the son of a ^prosperous and noble landed proprietor. He
became an officer but soon left the Army and in 1840, being
an enthusiastic Hegelian, went to Germany to study philosophy
at Berlin University. His teachers were partly the same as
Marx’s. Bakunin entered the Left Hegelian group and it was
not long before he was in the thick of the revolutionary
movement. His bold and open opposition to Russian absolutism
attracted universal attention, and Europe heard the voice of a
Russian revolutionary for the first time. In 1848 Bakunin was
a close associate of Herwegh’s and he shared the poet’s visionary
dream of a European revolutionary army which should set forth
against the realm of the Tsars. During the years of revolution
he went from place to place in Germany, always on the look-out
for an opportunity of carrying the agitation into Russia and
the other Slavonic countries. He was in contact with the leaders
of the German Democratic movement, founded a Russian-
Polish revolutionary committee, and prepared a rising in
Bohemia. But not one of his numerous plans bore fruit. He
participated in the rising in Dresden in May, 1849, more in a
mood of desperation than of faith in victory. He was arrested
and sentenced to death by a Saxon court. The Austrians, to
whom he was handed over, sentenced him to death a second
time, and he spent months in chains in the condemned cell.
Then the Austrian hangmen handed him over to the gaolers
of Russia, who kept him for five years in solitary confinement,
first in the fortress of Petropavlovsk, then in the Schlusselburg.
His treatment was unspeakably dreadful. He contracted
scurvy, lost all his teeth, and was only amnestied and banished
to Siberia after writing a humiliating petition to the Tsar. At
last, after five years, there came an opportunity to escape, and
he returned to Western Europe by way of Japan and America.
His first meeting with Marx was at an international Demo-
cratic banquet in Paris in March, 1844, but thqtwo had heard
280
MICHAEL BAKUNIN
28l
of each other before. They had a good deal in common. Both
had become revolutionaries by way of Hegelian philosophy and
both had trodden the path from theory to revolutionary prac-
tice. But they differed entirely in their idea of revolutionary
practice; in fact in their whole conception of the revolution they
were as the poles asunder. In Marx’s eyes the revolution was
the midwife of the new society which had formed in the womb
of the old. The new society would be the outcome of the old,
and a new and higher culture would be the heir of the old
culture, preserving and developing all the past attainments of
humanity. For Bakunin the revolution meant a radical annihi-
lation of existing society. What were all its so-called attainments
but a chain by which free humanity was held in bondage? For
him the revolution, if it did not mean making a clean sweep of
the whole of this accursed civilisation, meant nothing at all.
Not one stone of it should remain upon another. Bakunin
dreamed of a ‘gigantic bonfire of London, Paris and Berlin.’
His was the same hatred as that which drove insurrectionary
peasants to burn down castles and cities — not just the hated
prison and tax office but everything without exception, in-
cluding schools and libraries and museums. Mankind must
return, not just to the Middle Ages, but to the very beginning,
and from there the history of man must start again. Weitling
and Willich, with whom Bakunin was acquainted, had similar
ideas, but compared to the master of complete and absolute
negation they were but pitiful and harmless pupils.
It was evident that in these circumstances it was impossible
for Marx and Bakunin to come very close to one another.
Bakunin appreciated Marx’s clear and penetrating intellect,
but flatly repudiated his political activity. At the beginning of
1848, when he met Marx in Brussels, he said to a friend that
Marx was spoiling the workers by turning them into raisonneurs .
Marx was giving his lectures on wage-labour and capital at
the time, summarising the results of his investigations into the
structure of capitalist society. Bakunin was convinced that this
could have but one consequence; theorising was bound to
paralyse the workers’ revolutionary will, their ‘spirit of
destruction,’ which for him was the only ‘creative spirit.’
Marx never had the slightest sympathy for such incendiary
fantasies. He Ijad a fundamental mistrust for preaching such
282
KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
as his, and it was impossible for him not to mistrust Bakunin
personally* Marx printed a letter in the Neue Rheiniscke ^eitung
which accused Bakunin of being in the pay of the Russian
Government. The letter had been sent him by Polish Demo-
crats, and when the groundlessness of the accusation was
demonstrated Marx apologised and explained that he had
necessarily believed that the Poles must be well-informed about
Russian affairs.* At that time the whole of revolutionary
Europe looked at Russia through Polish spectacles, and in this
Marx differed in no way from everybody else. He admitted
having been hasty and did what he could to make good the
wrong to Bakunin. Marx publicly defended Bakunin when
a similar rumour was spread about him during his imprison-
ment in Russia. But Bakunin could not forgive Marx the
mistake of 1848, which went on rankling for a long time. To
make matters worse Bakunin was persuaded by evil-tongued
go-betweens, who did not mention Marx’s defence of him
during his compulsory silence, that Marx actually repeated
the old slander.
Bakunin visited Marx in London at the end of October,
1864, when he was writing the inaugural address for the
International. The meeting passed off in an entirely amicable
manner. Marx wrote to Engels that Bakunin was one of the
very few people who after sixteen years had not receded but
had gone on developing. What Bakunin said to cause Marx
to pass this favourable judgment on him is not known. In his
long years of imprisonment Bakunin had suffered greatly and
thought much. He had altered, and no longer wanted to make
giant bonfires of capital cities. In Siberia he had almost got
to the point of repudiating his revolutionary way of thinking
altogether, and when he was free once more he spent a con-
siderable time hesitating whether to adhere to the bourgeois
radicals or to the Socialists. He then started returning step
by step to. his original negative'anarchism. In his conversation
with Marx he asserted that henceforward he would devote
himself to the Socialist movement alone, and said that in
Italy, where he was just going, he proposed working for the
International.
Marx did not know Bakunin well enough to realise how little
these words were to be credited. There was a^treak of naive
MICHAEL BAKUNIN
283
slyness in Bakunin’s character, and he was skilful at adapting
his speech to his company. Bakunin would by no m^ans say
all he thought; indeed, he would quite often say thy reverse.
A story of how he tried to make a revolutionary of me Bishop
Polykarp, an adherent of the Old Faith, provides a pretty
instance of Bakunin’s way of tackling people he wanted to win
over. According to the story Bakunin entered the Bishop’s
room singing a sacred song and requested an explanation of
the difference between the persecuted Old Faith and the
prevalent orthodoxy. He said he was willing to become an
Old Believer himself if the Bishop could convince him. After
listening humbly to the Bishop he drew a magnificent picture
of the revolution, by which the true Old Faith would be
allowed to triumph over the Orthodox Church and cause the
Tsar himself to be converted, and much more of the same
kind. This story need not be credited entirely, but it illustrates
in all essentials how far Bakunin could occasionally go.
Bakunin had no intention of keeping his promise to work
for the International in Italy. Even before starting on his
journey he set about the formation of his own secret society,
which had nothing whatever to do with the International,
either in programme or organisation. In respect of organisa-
tion Bakunin was a revolutionary of the old school. He
belonged entirely to the epoch of the Illuminati and the
Carbonari. In his opinion the one thing necessary to prepare
the way for the revolution and consolidate it after victory was
a highly conspiratorial band of determined men, a band of
professional revolutionaries and plotters, who lived for nothing
but the revolution. Tn the midst of the popular anarchy
that will create the very life and energy of the revolution, the
unity of revolutionary thought and revolutionary action must
find an organ. That organ must be a secret and universal
association of revolutionary brothers.’ That is Bakunin’s own
summary of his revolutionary creed. Bakunin was continually
engaged in founding organisations of one kind or another,
and sometimes he was engaged on several at the same time.
They all had secret statutes and programmes that varied with
the degree of initiation of the members, and ceremonial oaths,
if possible sworn on a dagger or some similar theatrical requisite,
were usual. Bakjmin formed a secret society of this kind in
284 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
1865 — the ‘Fraternity Internationale/ It never entered his
head for a moment to do anything for the International, and
he barel^ answered the letters that Marx wrote him.
In the autumn of 1867 Bakunin travelled from Italy to take
part in the first Congress of the League of Peace and Freedom.
This organisation represented the last attempt of the Democratic
celebrities of 1848 and 1849, who for two decades had been the
‘great men of the emigration/ to venture once more into the
realm of high politics. The reawakening of political life
throughout Europe seemed to proffer this organisation some
prospect of success, and there were some famous names upon
its list of founders: Victor Hugo, Louis Blanc, John Stuart Mill,
Giuseppe Garibaldi. The League’s programme was a nebulous
mixture of democracy, anti-clericalism and pacifism, intended
to mean as much to as many people as possible. In practice
it did nothing for anybody.
The League, having practically no solid popular backing of
it own, was very anxious to be on good terms with the Inter-
national. An attempt was made to have it incorporated as a
kind of subsidiary organisation within the International, to
enable it to propagate its own special aims among the prole-
tariat. Marx was necessarily opposed to any such plan. The
development of the young workers’ movement could only be
hampered by connection with these generals without an army,
for the important men had only lent their names to the League
at its inception and in reality the movement was in the hands
of Democratic leaders of the second and third rank. To
involve the International with the League would mean
burdening it with a swarm of ambitious, wrangling and clique-
forming political intriguers.
Marx was not able to convince the International of all this
until 1868. The Brussels Congress of that year unanimously
carried a resolution embodying Marx’s attitude to the League.
A year before not a few members of the International had
sympathised with the idea of the League and had been only
too pleased to take part in its Congress. The League had
counted on this and held its inaugural Congress at the same
time and place as the second Congress of the International,
and a number of delegates remained and took part in the
League Congress after the International had concluded its
MICHAEL BAKUNIN 285
deliberations. At the League Congress they made the
acquaintance of Bakunin. I
His appearance was an event of first-rate importance for
the League. Many of the older generation knew him from
earlier years, from his life of wandering before the revolution
or from the exciting days of Paris, Berlin, Dresden or Prague.
Everyone had heard of the man who had been dragged
through the prisons of Europe and had been* twice sentenced
to death, and his escape from the grim horror of Siberia had
already become legendary. ‘I well remember his impressive
bearing at the first session of the Congress/ a Russian journalist
wrote in his memoirs. ‘As he walked up the steps that led to
the platform, with his heavy, peasant gait — he was, as usual,
negligently dressed in his grey blouse, out of which there
peeped not a shirt but a flannel vest — a great cry of “Bakunin!”
arose. Garibaldi, who was in the chair, rose and went forward
to embrace him. Many opponents of Bakunin’s were present,
but the whole hall rose to its feet and the applause was inter-
minable. Bakunin was no speaker if by that word is meant a
man who can satisfy a literary or educated public, who is
a master of language and whose speeches have a beginning, a
middle and an end, as Aristotle teaches. But he was a superb
popular orator, and he knew how to talk to the masses, and
the most remarkable feature of his oratory was that it was
multilingual. His huge form, the power of his gesticulations,
the sincerity and conviction in his voice, his short, hatchet-like
phrases all contributed to making a profound impression.’
To quote another Russian writer who heard Bakunin at
another meeting:
‘I no longer remember what Bakunin said, and in any case
it would scarcely be possible to reproduce it. His speech had
neither logical sequence nor richness in ideas, but consisted
of thrilling phrases and rousing appeals. His speech was
something elemental and incandescent — a raging storm with
lightning flashes and thunderclaps, and a roaring as of lions.
The man was a born speaker, made for the revolution. The
revolution was his natural being. His speech made a tremen-
dous impression. If he had asked his hearers to cut each
other’s throats, they would have cheerfully obeyed.’ That was
how Bakunin’s gpeech echoed sixty years later in the ears of a
286
KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
man who was no revolutionary at the time and was certainly
no revolutionary when he wrote his memoirs. His name was
Baron Wr^ngel, and he was the father of the well-known
General Wrangel, who fought against the Bolsheviks in South
Russia in 1919 and 1920.
Bakunin’s forceful personality gained him devoted followers
in the League and among the members of the International.
As was his invaViable habit he hastened to confirm his first
success by enrolling new initiates into one of his secret societies.
The ‘Fraternite Internationale’ appears to have been some-
what reorganised on this occasion, and it may well have
received a new name. (The history of Bakunin’s secret societies
is still in many respects uncertain. They were so often re-
organised than even Bakunin himself could not remember
all their ramifications and vicissitudes.) At any rate the
‘Fraternite’ was transplanted from Italy to Central Europe.
At the same time Bakunin became a member of the League
central committee. He did all he could to make the League
accept a revolutionary programme and bring it into line with
the International. His undoubted aim was to bring the two
organisations together and, by means of his secret organisation,
become the unseen leader of both. In this he failed. The
majority of the League’s members were by no means revolu-
tionary-minded, and all Bakunin’s proposals were voted down.
He became increasingly convinced of the impossibility of con-
verting the League into a suitable instrument for his revolu-
tionary work, and he awoke to the fact that there was far
greater scope for his activity in the International. He met
many of its members and became acquainted with the develop-
ment of its ideas. He had hitherto refrained from joining it
himself, but in July, 1868, he joined the Geneva branch. In
the autumn, after the International had definitely broken with
the League, he broke with it himself. At the second League
Congress, held at the end of September, 1868, he proposed
that it make a public avowal of Socialism. His resolution was
obviously unacceptable, and when the League turned it down
he and his followers left the Congress and resigned from
membership.
He promptly summoned his followers, most of whom were
adherents of the Traternite Internationale,’ and proposed that
MICHAEL BAKUNIN 287
they join the International in a body. This was intended to
keep his followers together. Joining the International in this
way would intensify rather than weaken their corpcya te sense.
His followers approved his plan, with a few unimportant
alterations. An open association, ‘L’Alliance Internationale
de la Democratic Sociale,’ was founded to exist side by side
with the secret society. The Alliance was intended to include
members outside the secret society, and thus act as a screen
for the secret society. It was to have its own programme and
statutes, its own leaders, its own sections in various countries,
its own international Congresses to be held at the same time
and place as those of the International. The plan was to form
a state within a state within the International. Officially the
object of the Alliance was the unpretentious one of ‘investi-
gating social and philosophical questions.’ Its real purpose
was to gain control of the International and lead it whither
Bakunin wanted, for behind it there would be his secret
organisation. There was to be a three-story pyramid, with
the International as the base, the Alliance on top of it and on
top of the Alliance the secret society, with Bakunin the
‘invisible dictator 5 at the pinnacle.
The plan was too clever and consequently too clumsy to
succeed. It failed to get farther than the initial stages. The
Alliance was successfully founded and quite a number of
respectable and deserving members of the Swiss sections of the
International joined it. The statutes were duly drawn up and
signed and dispatched for confirmation by the General Council.
Bakunin’s name was among the signatures, tucked in incon-
spicuously among the rest.
Marx had no means of divining the details of Bakunin’s plan,
but promptly discerned Bakunin’s object. This was no new
turn of the working-class movement, no new organisation of
workers demanding admission to the ranks of the united inter-
national proletariat. This was an organisation created by a
plotter of the old school who aimed at gaining control of the
great new movement represented by the International, which
under Marx’s leadership was striving to guide the struggle of
the proletariat in the only way it ought to be guided, in all
openness, as an open mass-organisation. Marx had not spent
twenty years fighting the methods of the Carbonari, and all
288
KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
the poison-and-dagger nonsense, to let it creep into the
International by the back-door now.
When\he statutes of the Alliance came up for consideration
by the General Council, its members, of course with Marx’s
concurrence, expressed a wish that the International should
publicly repudiate it. Marx wrote to Engels late that night
after the meeting. The thing of which he had heard previously
and had regarded as still-born, he said, and had wanted to let
quietly die had turned out to be more serious than he had
expected. ‘Herr Bakunin — who is at the back of this affair —
is kind enough to want to take the workers’ movement under
Russian control.’ Marx was particularly incensed at such a
thing having been perpetrated by a Russian, citizen of a
country that had no workers’ movement of its own and was
therefore less fit than anybody to grapple with the difficulties
confronting the European movement. Engels pacified Marx a
little. He said it was as clear as daylight that the International
would not allow itself to be taken in by a swindle such as this
state within a state, this organisation which had nothing what-
ever behind it. T, like you, consider it to be a still-born,
purely local, Geneva affair. Its only chance of survival would
be for you to attack it violently and give it importance thereby.
In my opinion it would be best firmly but quietly to dismiss
these people with their pretensions to insinuate themselves into
the International.’ Marx agreed with Engels, and the General
Council declined to confirm the statutes of the Alliance as
an organisation within the International. After protracted
negotiations the Alliance as such was eventually dissolved.
Individual groups of its members were permitted to enter the
International under the usual conditions and to form local
sections. No mention of the secret society was made through-
out, and the General Council did not know of its existence.
The secret society disintegrated once more and was once more
reconstructed. Bakunin quarrelled with the majority of the
directoire centrale of the Fraternite Internationale, resigned from
the Fraternite and dissolved it, only to found it anew promptly
afterwards with his own most devoted followers. His first
rapprochement with Nechaiev, of whom more will be said later,
occurred during these months.
Bakunin had not answered Marx from Italy, and he gave no
MICHAEL BAKUNIN
289
sign of life from Switzerland. Marx sent him a copy of Das
Kapitaly but Bakunin remained silent and did not j^ven write a
line of thanks. But a few days after the Alliance h&d submitted
its statutes to the General Council Bakunin wrote. It was a
long letter, overflowing with friendliness. 6 Ma patrie main-
tenant c'est r Internationale, dont tu es Fun des principaux fondateurs .
Tu vois done , cher ami , que je suis ton disciple , et je suis fier de
VetreF 1 •
This sounded genuine, upright and sincere, but it was any-
thing but what it seemed. The letter was a calculated part of
the web of intrigue that Bakunin was spinning round Marx.
Bakunin certainly had a high opinion of Marx and considered
Das Kapital to be a scientific achievement of supreme impor-
tance. He even wanted to translate it into Russian. But that
did not affect Bakunin’s conviction that Marx was his arch-
enemy, whose main purpose was to lay snares and traps for
him; and he believed himself to be thoroughly justified in
fighting Marx. Some three months after this declaration of
love Bakunin wrote to his old friend, Gustav Vogt, one of the
founders of the League, of the ‘distrust or even ill-will of a
certain coterie the centre of which you no doubt have guessed
as well as I.’ That coterie was the General Council of the
International which had been against amalgamation with the
League of Peace and Freedom, and its centre was Marx,
Bakunin’s cher ami.
In a letter he wrote Alexander Herzen on October 28, 1869,
Bakunin explained in all clarity the methods he proposed to
use in his campaign against Marx. Herzen had remonstrated
with Bakunin for daring to attack some of Marx’s followers in
the Press without daring to attack Marx himself. Bakunin
replied that he had two reasons for refraining from attacking
Marx. The first was the real service that Marx had done by
laying the foundations of scientific socialism. ‘The second
reason is policy and tactics. ... I praised and honoured
Marx for tactical reasons and on grounds of personal policy.
Don’t you see what all these gentlemen are? Our enemies
form a phalanx, and to be able to defeat it the more easily it
is necessary to divide it and break it up. You are more learned
1 My country is now the International, of which you are one of the principal
founders. You see, therefore, my dear friend, that I am your disciple, and I am
proud of it.
19
29O KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
than I, and therefore know better than I who first said:
Divide et imjma . If I started an open war against Marx now,
three-quarter^ of the International would turn against me, and
I should find Vnyself slipping down an inclined plane, and I
should lose the only ground on which I wish to stand. 5 To
weaken the Marxian phalanx Bakunin chose to attack Marx’s
little-known followers, and in the meantime he stressed his
friendship for Marx.
Marx was not for a moment deceived as to what his expres-
sion of friendship was really worth. He did not answer Baku-
nin’s love letter. Marx had not a few defects. He was not
always easy and pleasant to get on with, but he was incapable
of simulating friendship for a person while he was busy laying
a trap for him.
Bakunin worked very hard to build up and extend his secret
society, and it was important to be on good terms with the
group of young ‘Internationalists’ at Locle, who have already
been mentioned. Bakunin made the acquaintance of Guil-
laume, their leader, in January, 1869. Guillaume invited him
to Locle. He accepted the invitation and was received like a
hero. Guillaume’s account of the events of that day deserve
to be repeated, for he paints such a characteristic picture
of Bakunin, illustrating not only Bakunin as seen through
his followers’ eyes, but how Bakunin presented himself to
them.
6 La nouvelle de la venue du celebre revolutionnaire russe avait mis
le Locle en emoi; et dans les ateliers , dans les cercles , dans les salons ,
on ne parlait que de lui. ... On se disait que la presence , dans les
rangs de V Internationale, d’un homme aussi energique, ne pouvait
manquer de lui apporter une grande force .’ 1 Locle was an obscure
provincial township, and for a celebrity to visit it was an epoch-
making event; and now a rare and exotic celebrity was actually
on the spot. The big watchmaking village could scarcely con-
tain itself with excitement. J’etais alle Vattendre a la gare avec
le pere Meuron , et nous le conduisimes au Cercle International , ou nous
passames le reste de V apres-midi a causer avec quelques amis qui s’y
1 The news of the arrival of the celebrated Russian revolutionary had put Locle
into a state of high excitement. He was the sole subject of conversation in work-
shops, clubs and drawing-rooms. . . . Everyone said that the presence in the
ranks of the International of a man as energetic as he could not fail to be a source
of great strength.
MICHAEL BAKUNIN 2gi
itaient reunis ’ 1 The local branch, the Cercle International , was
just celebrating the sixty-fifth birthday of ‘Father 5 Meuron, a
French emigre , who had been a Carbonaro in the Jlays of the
July Monarchy and perhaps in the days of the^Restoration
too. The Internationalists of Lode, all hungry for experience,
surrounded Bakunin. ‘ Si Vimposante stature de Bakounine
frappait les imaginations , la familiarite de son accueil lui gagnait les
cceurs; il Jit immediatement la conquete de tout le monde . 2 Bakunin
showed himself a blithe and sociable human being, a good
raconteur, homely and simple. ‘ Dans les conversations , Bakou-
nine racontait volontiers des historiettes , des souvenirs de sajeunesse , des
choses qu’il avait dites ou entendu dire . II avait tout un repertoire
d’ anecdotes , de proverbes , des mots favorits qu’il aimait a repeter’*
Guillaume particularly remembered one story which Bakuniu
told. ‘ Une fois , d la fin d’un diner , en Allemagne , il avait , nous
dit il en riant , porte ce toast , accueilli par un tonnerre d’ applaudisse-
ments : “Je bois a la destruction de V or dr e public et au dechainement
des mauvaises passions ’ 5 54 Bakunin described the seven stages
of happiness as follows: ‘ En premier lieu , comme bonheur
supreme mourir en combattant pour la liberte; en second lieu , 1 ’ amour
et I’amitie; en troisieme lieu , la science et V art ; quatriemement , fumer;
cinquiemement , boire; sixiemement , manger; septiement , dormir’ b
Twenty years before Bakunin had defined the seven stages
of happiness in the same way, and he had spoken of the un-
leashing of the passions then too. Only in the meantime the
sentiments had grown somewhat faded. Richard Wagner had
heard Bakunin say all these things in 1849, on ^Y ln Wagner’s
memoirs they sound like extracts from some dim northern
saga. But retailed by Guillaume they remind one of a provincial
1 I went to meet him at the station with Father Meuron, and we took him to
the International Club, where we spent the rest of the afternoon talking with some
friends who had gathered there.
2 If Bakunin’s imposing stature struck the imagination, the familiarity of his
greeting gained men’s hearts. He promptly made a conquest of everybody.
3 In conversation Bakunin willingly related anecdotes, gave reminiscences of
his youth, told us things he had said or heard. He had a whole repertoire of
anecdotes, proverbs and favourite sayings that he liked to repeat.
4 Once, at the end of a dinner in Germany, he had proposed a toast, he told us
laughing, saying: ‘ I drink to the destruction of public order and the unleashing of
evil passions.’
5 In the first place, the supreme happiness was to die fighting for liberty; in the
second place, love and friendship; in the third place, science and art; in the
fourth place, smoking; in the fifth place, drinking; in the sixth place, eating; and
in the seventh place^ sleeping.
292 KARL MARX.* MAN AND FIGHTER
schoolmaster describing the bounty of some brilliant talker
to an admiring audience.
Bakunin accepted Guillaume into his secret society. Bakunin
no longer attached importance to swearing oaths upon a
dagger. He explained the object of the society as 4 Le litre
rapprochement d’hommes qui s’ unissaient pour V action collective , sans
formalite, sans solennite , sans rites mysterieux , simplement parce qu’ils
avaient confiance leu uns dans les autres et que V entente leur paraissait
priferable d V action isolee .’ 1 Guillaume is no objective witness, but
he must have been pretty faithful to the facts in this. However
much Bakunin wanted to assimilate his organisation to the
International, it remained a secret society within the Inter-
national, keeping its existence secret from it and aiming at
gaining control of it. Guillaume bears witness to this, for he
describes how Meuron, the old Carbonaro, who joined the
secret society at the same time, rejoiced. c Il rejouissait d la
pensee que V Internationale serait doublee d’une organisation secrete qui
la preserverait du danger que pouvaient lui faire courir les intrigants et
les ambitieux .’ 2
The contrast between the ideas of the old Illuminati,
Carbonari and the rest and those whose aim was to use the
International to lead the workers into forming great mass-
organisations could not have been better expressed than it was
by pire Meuron. He had spent his whole life as a member of
one or other small band of conspirators, and he could not
conceive that a mass-organisation in which there was such a
thing as an open struggle of ideas could be anything but a
cockpit for the intriguing and ambitious. It seemed obvious
to him that the unrestricted life of a large, public organisation,
open to all the world, must be supervised by groups of the type
familiar to him. These groups, set up behind the back of the
mass-organisation, must obviously refrain from openly pro-
claiming their programmes, and even their existence must not
be known of. It was these groups that must be the real con-
trollers of the movement. Meuron and those who thought
like him regarded all this as entirely open and above-board.
1 A free association of men who united for collective action, without formality,
without solemnity, without mysterious rites, simply because they felt confidence
in one another and deemed unity preferable to isolated action.
2 He rejoiced at the thought that the International would be doubled by a
secret organisation which should preserve it from the dangers to which the
intriguing and ambitious might subject it. t
MICHAEL BAKUNIN 293
So far from regarding it as partaking of the nature of intrigue,
they actually regarded it as a sure defence and shield against
the ambitious and intriguing.
Bakunin managed to extend his secret society pretty quickly,
in spite of obstacles. He and his friends had great hopes of
the next International Congress, to be held at Bale in Sep-
tember, 1869. They made every effort to be as well repre-
sented at it as possible. The secret Alliance sent instructions
to its adherents in every corner of Europe, directing them
whom to choose as delegates and to whom to give a mandate
if they could not send one of their own men. In many areas
members were very surprised indeed to find that for the first
time in the history of the International the selection of delegates
was not being carried out in a straightforward, open, matter-
of-fact way, and letters reached the General Council asking
what was in the wind.
Bakunin and his followers had not worked badly, and they
were represented at the Congress in quite respectable numbers.
Nevertheless their expectations were not entirely fulfilled,
though they had one or two successes. The most important
was in the debate on the inheritance question. The Congress
rejected the resolution of the General Council, which was
drafted by Marx, and accepted Bakunin’s resolution instead.
But they did not succeed in their principal aim, which was to
have the headquarters of the General Council transferred from
London to Geneva, where Bakunin would have been its lord
and master.
The Bale Congress marks an important stage in the struggle
between ‘Marxists’ and ‘Bakuninists.’ The fundamental differ-
ences were not mentioned, the root-problem was not debated,
and the real dispute was only hinted at. But anyone who
followed the progress of the Congress attentively and had a
certain experience of the history of the movement could plainly
detect the call to battle. Moses Hess, the ‘Communist rabbi,’
had a practised ear. He had been present at Marx’s struggle
with Weitling and had known the cause of dissension between
Marx and Gottschalk and had followed Marx’s struggle with
Willich and his followers in the Communist League. He
attended the Congress and heard the unspoken words: ‘The
Collectivists of the International believe that the political
294 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
revolution must precede the social and democratic revolution. 5
Bakunin an^J his followers made the political revolution coin-
cide with the social revolution. They made no concealment of
their opinion. VThe organ of Bakunin’s followers in Switzerland
wrote as answer to Hess’s utterance, 4 We shall persist in refusing
to associate ourselves with any political movement the immediate
and direct aim of which is not the immediate and direct emancipation of
the workers’ The qualifying relative clause is emphasised in the
original. The Bakuninists did not reject political struggle of
any kind, as was later supposed. If its object was the direct
realisation of their ultimate aim, ‘the revolution and social
democracy,’ they were ready to participate. They were even
capable of making quite big concessions and deviating widely
frofli their usual tactics. But they insisted that any political
movement in which they took part must lead directly to the
social revolution. That was the condition from which they
would not depart. The emphasis was on the definition of
direct and immediate .
About this time, at the end of 1869, the Bakuninists started
proclaiming the principle of not taking part in elections for
any kind of Parliament, and with this their struggle with the
Marxists in Switzerland began. Taking part in the Swiss
elections, i.e. in the political movement, meant embarking on
a long* period of patient work of enlightenment among the
workers, and only those who believed that the political and
social revolution could not be one could undertake it. On the
other hand, in lands where the revolution was ripening quickly,
the Bakuninists by no means declined to participate in elec-
tions, granted that the elections were the first step to the social
revolution. But the elections had to be the first step. The
second step must be the social revolution itself. Those were
the tactics of Bakunin’s followers in Paris, the leader of whom
was Varlin, the best-known representative of the Paris section
of the International at the time. He proclaimed himself, in
the Press and in court, an adherent of ‘anti-authoritarian
Communism,’ which was the name by which the Bakuninists
started calling themselves.
Varlin had joined Bakunin’s secret society at the Bale Con-
gress, and was Bakunin’s closest confidant in Paris. Neverthe-
less at the end of 1869 he joined the staff of the Marseillaise ,
MICHAEL BAKUNIN
295
which was edited by Rochefort and was the most influential
radical paper in Paris. It was actually the organ of tlte General
Council of the International and of Marx personally and it
stood for participation in the elections. Its policy^vas that the
electoral movement and Parliament must be used for the
revolution. Varlin explained his motives in a letter to his
Swiss associates. He said that the existing situation in France
did not permit the Socialist party to remain aloof from politics.
At the moment the question of the imminent fall of the Empire
took precedence of everything else, and it was necessary for the
Socialists to be at the head of the movement, under pain of
abdication. If they held aloof from politics, they would be
nothing in France to-day, while as it was they were on the eve
of being everything. Neither the Swiss nor Bakunin himself
had any objection to this policy, which in their eyes was justified
if it led to the revolution and was the most direct way to the
social revolution.
Whatever criticism may be made of Bakunin, lie was not a
man to be satisfied with empty formulas. Fie acted in accor-
dance with the demands of his ideas, and he acted very energeti-
cally. Immediately after the conclusion of the Bale Congress,
at which he strengthened and extended his secret society, he
set about preparing for a revolutionary rising. What his clans
were, the exact details of what he was preparing for, arenaot
known, but it is known that in December, 1869, and January,
1870, he was conducting a lively correspondence with members
of his organisation in various French towns, for the revolution
was to break out first in France. His people worked devotedly
and successfully.
A large number of the most active members of the Inter-
national, revolutionary-minded young men like Varlin and
Pindy in Paris, Richard in Lyon, Bastelica in Marseilles,
entered Bakunin’s organisation and prepared for an insurrection.
The situation seemed more favourable than ever. The
prestige of the Empire was severely shaken and everyone felt
that its days were numbered. The revolution, the downfall of
Louis Bonaparte, might perhaps be delayed a little longer, but
it was inevitable nevertheless. The policy of the General
Council, led by Marx, was based on the imminence of a revolu-
tion in France. ^But it differed fundamentally, in general and
296 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
in particular, down to even the most insignificant details, from
that of Bakunin. Bakunin’s societies, unknown to the working
masses, with a programme that they carefully concealed,
worked outsNde society, worked deliberately outside society,
planning and plotting violence.
The General Council strove to lead the workers as a whole,
as a mass-movement, towards a political and economic
struggle with the Empire that should be above-board and
patent to everybody, and they strove to teach the workers the
incompatibility in practice of their interests and those of their
rulers. In May, 1870, the French Imperial Government
started a hue-and-cry after the International, dissolving its
sections and arresting a number of its leaders. To Marx this
declaration of war was welcome. ‘The French Government,’
he wrote to Engels on May 1 8, ‘has at last done what we have
so long wanted — turned the political question of empire or
republic into a question of life and death for the working class.’
The International, suppressed by Napoleon, must promptly
re-arise and openly defy the ban, exploiting in every one of its
utterances every opportunity, however meagre, of proclaiming
to rulers and workers alike its determination not to allow
itself to be suppressed and its resolution to continue with its
mass-propaganda. ‘Our French members are demonstrating
beneath the eyes of the French Government the difference
between a secret political society and a real workers’ move-
ment,’ Marx wrote in the same letter. ‘Scarcely had the
committee members in Paris, Lyon, Rouen, Marseilles, etc.,
been locked up (some of them succeeded in escaping to
Switzerland) when twice the number of new committees
immediately proclaimed themselves their successors with the
most impudent and defiant announcements in the newspapers,
even giving their private addresses.’
The Bakuninists went on plotting in the dark. Marx heard
of their existence for the first time in the spring of 1871, and
for some time all he knew about them was the fact of their
existence. When material dealing with the Bakuninist organi-
sations fell into the hands of the Paris police as a result of the
arrests in May, 1871, and the public prosecutor announced in
the Press that a secret society of conspirators existed besides
the official International, Marx believed it to be one of the
7 #
MICHAEL BAKUNIN 297
usual police discoveries. ‘It’s the old tomfoolery,’ he wrote to
Engels. ‘In the end the police won’t even believe %ach other
any more. This is too good.’
Marx did not yet know how wide the ratifications of
Bakunin’s organisation were. The abyss that separated his
conception of programme, tactics and method from that of
Bakunin at the beginning of 1870 had become so wide that it
was unbridgeable. Marx had to engage once more in the
struggle in which he had been engaged for the greater part of
his life in constantly changing forms. Meanwhile war had
become inevitable. European events postponed it, complicated
it, blurred the issues. That it was bound to break out was
clear to everyone in the winter of 1869.
CHAPTER XIX
THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR
In the year of the foundation of the International Prussia and
Austria were at war with Denmark. Two years later there was
war in Lombardy for the unification of Italy and in Bohemia
for the hegemony of Germany. After 1866 war — revanche pour
Sadowa — had become inevitable between the France of Louis
Napoleon and Bismarck’s Prussia. The International, from
the first day of its existence, had had to take a stand towards
w^r and foreign politics. The inaugural address had pro-
claimed the necessity of the proletariat’s having its own foreign
policy, based on the solidarity of the workers of all countries.
The workers’ International must answer ruling-class policy
with its own. This principle was accepted as a matter of course
by all groups within the International, even those of the most
divergent views. But as soon as it came to putting principle
into practice acute differences arose.
The Polish question was the first. Sympathy for the fate of
the unfortunate people of Poland was universal among revo-
lutionaries and mere radicals too, and this widespread feeling
had contributed substantially to the foundation of the Inter-
national. The International had helped to organise the meet-
ing of July 22, 1863, summoned to consider ways and means
of assisting the Polish rising. Poland enjoyed the sympathy of
all. But there were not a few who shrank from the inevitable
political implications of a more or less sentimental mood.
Marx’s phrases about Russia in the inaugural address had
roused a good deal of opposition, for he maintained, just as in
1 848, that Russia was still the mainstay of European reaction
and that Russia must therefore be vanquished first. Marx was
pro-Polish because he was anti-Rus sian, Poland’s resuscitation
would involve the break-up of the ‘Holy Alliance,’ which was
always re-arising from its ashes in spite of the celebrations over
its decease, and the end of the Russian nightmare which lay
oppressively over Europe, stifling every revolutionary move-
ment.
298
THE FRAN CO-PRUSSIAN WAR 299
There were many in Germany and still more in England who
thought as Marx did. In the Latin countries it was otherwise.
The Proudhonists were the chief of those who repudiated
Marx’s ‘Russophobia.’ They did not deny that i > had been
justified in the forties, but they claimed that it was superfluous,
actually harmful now. They held that however obnoxious
Russian despotism might be in principle, from the working-
class point of view it differed not at all from the governments
of Napoleon III or Bismarck or even of the Cabinet of Her
Majesty Queen Victoria. All were bourgeois governments alike.
The Proudhonists declined to recognise the alleged excessive
influence of Russia on the destiny of Europe. They rejected
the notion of directing the whole weight of International policy
primarily against Russia, and at the Geneva Congress of i866 4
declined to vote for a foreign policy resolution demanding the
‘annihilation of Russia’s despotic influence on Europe’ on the
ground that the resolution should have been worded ‘the
annihilation of all despotism.’
In the dispute between Marx and the Proudhonists concern-
ing the attitude to be adopted towards Russia and Poland the
differences in their estimates of the historical period through
which Europe was passing and the tasks that confronted the
International in it emerged for the first time. They were soon
to assume a more manifest form.
During the revolutionary period of 1 848 and 1 849 in Central
Europe the demand for national unity had been intimately
associated with the demand for political freedom. It was an
axiom at that time that the way to national unity lay only
through the overthrow of the princes. Only freedom created
unity and only in unity was there freedom. This article of
faith was adhered to even by the German bourgeois Democrats,
though their consciences were mightily plagued by their
inherited petty-bourgeois respect for every crowned head; and
it remained part of the creed of the Italian Democrats. But the
wars of the sixties seemed to confute it utterly. For Italy was
not united by Mazzini but by Cavour, a royal minister of
state, and the German people were not united by themselves,
but by Bismarck, with blood and iron, under the spiked
Prussian helmet.
To the Proudhonists national movements were simply
300 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
incomprehensible, and nations themselves were ‘obsolete preju-
dices. 5 They could not understand how ‘the social question 5
could be mixed up with antiquated ‘superstitious ideas 5 about
national u.iity and independence at a time when ‘the social
question 5 overshadowed everything else, and was indeed
the only question that mattered at all. In their eyes anyone
who connected ‘the national question 5 with ‘the social question 5
was a reactionary. That a man like Bismarck was able to
assume the leadership of a national movement only confirmed
them in their entirely negative judgment of what they regarded
as belonging to long-obsolete historical phases. In their eyes
every single state, without any exception whatever, was
founded on ‘centralism and despotism, 5 the contradictions of
which, as long as the world had not found its ‘economic
equilibrium, 5 would continue to be fought out in wars. In
these ever-recurring conflicts they did not regard it as the busi-
ness of the proletariat to try and find out which side was
objectively serving the cause of human progress, and then to
support that side. No, the proletariat had only one duty.
This, as de Paepe stated at the International Congress of
1868, consisted in the fundamental reconstruction of social
and political institutions; because that was the only way
a permanent end could be made of ever-recurring inter-
national disputes. The Proudhonists stood for energetic
anti-military propaganda, demanded the abolition of stand-
ing armies and were the first to raise the question of
the general strike as the weapon of the proletariat against
war.
For these radical-sounding phrases Marx had little use.
Ever since 1 848 he had been preachin g war wi th Russia, for he
believed such a war would be a most powerful engine of the
revolution. As in the past, he regarded war as a factor in
historical growth and in some circumstances a factor of histori-
cal advance. Whether a particular war were really the latter
or not and what attitude the proletariat should adopt towards
it were questions to be decided on the merits of the particular
case. In foreign just as in domestic politics Marx rejected the
idea of anything being in itself ‘reactionary. 5 Which of two
warring nations gained the victory could not possibly be a
matter of complete indifference to the proletarian movement,
THE FRAN CO-PRUSSIAN WAR 301
the attitude of which should not be one of rigid adherence to
a comfortable position of apparent extreme radicAlism, but
should be supple and pliant, ready to change in accordance
with the changing situation. $
In spite of Proudhonist criticism Marx remained convinced,
as he had been in 1848, that national movements had a pro-
gressive function, at any rate among great peoples such as the
Germans, the Italians, the Poles, and the Hungarians. In a
letter to Karl Kautsky written many years later Engels neatly
summarised the reasons for Marx’s belief. ‘It is historically
impossible for a great people to be in a position even to discuss
any internal question seriously as long as national independence
is lacking,’ he wrote. ‘An international movement of the
proletariat is only possible among independent natior^,
between equals.’ In this national nihilism of the Proudhonists
Marx discerned not only a remarkable form of French national-
ism but the lurking assumption that the French were the
chosen nation.
After a meeting of the General Council in June, 1866, at
which there was a lengthy discussion of national questions,
Marx described their attitude in a letter to Engels as ‘Proudhon-
ised Stirnerianism. They want to reduce everything to small
“groups” or “communes,” and then build up a “union” but
no state. And this “individualising,” of humanity with its
accompanying “mutualism,” is to be brought about while
history in other countries stands still and the whole world
waits until the French are ripe for the social revolution. They
will then demonstrate the experiment before our eyes and the
rest of the world, overcome by their example, will follow it. . . .
It is exactly what Fourier expected from his phalansteres .’ At
the meeting in question Marx remarked that the French ‘while
denying all nationality appeared quite unconsciously to recon-
cile it with their own absorption into the model nation which
was France.’ True, Napoleon’s hypocritical concern for the
destinies of nations that had not yet achieved unity drove his
opponents to the opposite extreme; and the petty-bourgeois
Socialists’ dislike of national concentration, i.e. economic
concentration, came out in their dislike of the economic
developments that led to it.
Just because he regarded the movement towards national
302 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
unity as a historical advance over the period of national sub-
division in^o minor and petty states, Marx regarded Bismarck’s
policy with the greatest suspicion. For a long time he had
mistrusted Bismarck’s policy as an exclusively Prussian one,
and held Bismarck to be the tool now of Napoleon, now of
Russia. To Marx the idea that Germany could be united by
being Prussianised seemed absurd. He and Engels were
certainly not pro-Austrian during the Prusso-Austrian war,
but still less were they pro-Prussian. Engels hoped the Prus-
sians would ‘get a good hiding 5 and Marx was convinced that
they would ‘pay for their boasting.’ Marx expected that the
defeat of Prussia would lead to a revolution in Berlin. ‘Unless
there is a revolution,’ he wrote to Engels on April 6, 1866, ‘the
Bohenzollern and Habsburg dogs will throw our country fifty
or a hundred years back by civil (dynastic) wars.’ Unless
there were a revolution, he repeated in a letter he wrote on the
same day to his friend Kugelmann in Hanover, Germany
would be on the threshold of another Thirty Years’ War, and
that would mean a divided Germany once more.
To Marx Prussia’s rapid and brilliant victory was entirely
unexpected. Prussian hegemony in Germany became a fact.
The unpleasant prospect of Germany being merged into
Prussia became a possibility to be reckoned with. That Bis-
marck’s ambitions were not German ambitions but ‘dynastic-
Hohenzollern’ ambitions was plain enough. But his blunt
refusal to entertain the French demand for ‘compensation’ for
having remained neutral in the Austrian war and the harsh-
ness with which he asserted Prussian demands in the dispute
about Luxemburg immediately afterwards finally destroyed
the suspicion that he was only a tool of Napoleon. The re-
actionary Junker Bismarck introduced universal suffrage into
the North German Reichstag, though for reasons that differed
profoundly from those for which Lassalle had agitated for it
only a few years previously. The irresistible progress of the
Prussianisation of Germany became clearer every day, and
those in the workers’ movement could afford to ignore it less
than anybody. It had to adapt itself to the new situation, be
as pliable and resilient as its opponent, Bismarck. Universal
suffrage created a vast new field of action for it. The two
Socialist parties were represented in the North German
THE FRAN GO - PRUSSIAN WAR 303
Reichstag, the followers of Lassalle and the ‘Eisenachcr,’ the
latter led by Licbknecht and young August Bebel.
In the Paris Chamber the Opposition parties, consisting of
more or less determined Republicans and Orleapists, were
represented plentifully enough. But there was not a single
Socialist. Germany’s greater social maturity was demon-
strated by that alone. German industry had already surpassed
the French. New, scientifically equipped factories were rising
in the Rhineland, in Saxony, in Silesia, every year, and
genuine proletarian centres were forming round them, and
class differences were making their appearance more rapidly
and more acutely than in any other country, including France.
The traditional idea of the leading role played by France in
social development grew less and less justified as the years
went by. In the forties Marx had held up France as a model
to the Germans and measured Germany’s level by that of its
neighbour. From the beginning of the sixties Marx gradually
began to doubt the old, familiar idea. Engels had started
doubting it even earlier; and as German economic develop-
ments became more and more impressive and as the process of
the unification of the state, albeit in crooked, incomplete and
half-feudal forms, became more manifest, Marx gradually
became convinced that it was to the German workers’ move-
ment that the future belonged. In 1870, before the outbreak
of the Franco-Prussian war, he wrote to Engels: ‘It is my firm
conviction that, though the first impulse will come from
France, Germany is far riper for a social movement and will
outdistance France by far. The French are guilty of great
error and self-deception if they still believe themselves to be
the “chosen people.”’ In the middle of February, 1870, he
wrote to Kugelmann that he expected more for the social
movement from Germany than from France. The unification
of Germany was the preliminary to and the guarantee of a
proletarian movement in the heart of Europe.
In the summer of 1870, when the Franco-Prussian war broke
out, Marx did not hesitate for a moment. For the patriotic
excesses of the German upper class and petty-bourgeoisie he
had nothing but contempt, reserving particular scorn for the
dithyrambic outbursts of those who had recently been his
comrades and even friends. After reading Freiligrath’s war
304 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
poems he wrote to Engels that he would rather be a miaowing
cat thail a ballad-monger of that kind. He was indignant at
the leaders of the Lassalle faction, who gave unconditional
support to (Jie Prussian Government in making war on France,
but approved of Bebel and Liebknecht, who voted against war
credits, though he did not agree with their reasons. It seemed
obvious to Marx that in the struggle with Bismarck there could
be no truce, even in war.
Germany’s cause was not the Hohenzollerns’ cause. Ger-
many was attacked and not Prussia, and Germany must defend
herself. But a German victory was essential above all in the
interests of the workers’ movement. Marx held that there
were two reasons why it would be fatal for Louis Napoleon to
win. In France the Bonapartist regime would be consolidated
for many years and Central Europe would be thrown back
whole decades, and the process of the unification of Germany
would be interrupted. And then, as Engels wrote on August
15, 1870, there could be no more talk of an independent
German workers’ movement and everything would be ab-
sorbed in the struggle for the re-establishment of the national
existence. On the other hand a German victory would mean
the end of Bonapartism, and whatever Government followed
the French would have a freer field. ‘If the Prussians win,’
Marx wrote to Engels immediately after the outbreak of war,
‘the centralisation of the state power will be useful for the
centralisation of the German working-class. Moreover, Ger-
man preponderance will cause the centre of gravity of the
workers’ movement in Western Europe to be still more defi-
nitely shifted from France to Germany, and it is only necessary
to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 till
now to see that the German working class is superior both
theoretically and in organisation to the French.’
On July 23, 1870, the General Council issued a manifesto on
the war. It was written by Marx. Addressed as it was to the
workers of the whole world, it was obviously impossible for it
to contain all the arguments that determined Marx’s position.
It stated that ‘on the German side the war was a war of
defence,’ which immediately raised the question of who had
placed Germany in the position of having to defend herself.
In Bismarck Marx no longer saw a servant but rather a pupil
THE FRAN CO-PRUSSIAN WAR 305
and imitator of Napoleon. The manifesto, which was issued
when the war had only just begun, stressed the fatt that the
defence of Germany might degenerate into a war upon J^he
French people. But if the German working ciass permitted
that, victory or defeat would be equally evil. ‘All the evils
that Germany had to suffer after the so-called Wars of Libera-
tion would be revived and redoubled, 5 the manifesto concluded.
‘The alliance of the workers of all countries will finally
exterminate war. 5
In a letter to Wilhelm Liebknecht Marx gave his German
comrades still more specific advice. This letter has not sur-
vived, but Engels’s letter to Marx, dated August 15, 1870, in
which he laid down the tactical line to be adopted in a manner
with which Marx entirely agreed, has been preserved, ye
wrote: ‘In my view, what our_ people can do is (1) associate
themselves with the national movement as long as it is confined
to the defence of Germany (in some circumstances an offensive
persisting right up to conclusion of peace might not be incon-
sistent with this) ; (2) at the same time emphasise the distinction
between the national interests of Germany and the dynastic
interests of Prussia; (3) oppose the annexation of Alsace-
Lorraine — Bismarck’s intention of annexing Alsace-Lorraine
to Bavaria and Baden has already transpired; (4) as soon as a
Republican, non-chauvinist Government is at the helm in
Paris, work for an honourable peace with it; (5) continually
stress the unity of interests of the workers of France and Ger-
many, who did not want the war and are not at war with each
other; (6) Russia, as in the International manifesto.’ There
had been only one sentence in the manifesto about Russia,
pointing out that its ‘sinister form’ was ‘lurking in the back-
ground of this suicidal struggle. 5
The manifesto commended the French workers for declaring
themselves against the war and against Napoleon. But that
was all. Neither in the manifesto nor in the correspondence
between Marx and Engels is there a word about the duties of
the French proletariat during those pregnant weeks. Marx,
in all the years during which a stupefied world hailed Napo-
leon III as a genuine heir of the Corsican, clung to his opinion
that he was but ‘commonplace canaille , 5 and long before the
rottenness of the Bonaparte regime had become manifest to
20
306 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
all beholders Marx held that its fate was already sealed.
‘Whatever \he result of Louis Napoleon’s War with Prussia
maf be,’ the manifesto stated, ‘the death knell of the Second
Empire has afc^eady sounded in Paris.’ From the first day of
hostilities Engels, as a student of war, was convinced that
Germany would win. His articles on the campaign in the Pall
Mall Gazette attracted a great deal of attention, and the
accuracy with wh'ch he predicted the catastrophe of Sedan,
even to the very date, confirmed his reputation as the ‘General,’
which was the nickname by which his friends henceforward
invariably called him. Napoleon’s defeat was certain, and
Napoleon’s defeat would mean a revolution in France. But in
what a situation! ‘If a revolution breaks out in Paris,’ Marx
wrote to Engels on August 8, ‘the question arises: have they
the resources and the leaders to put up serious opposition to
the Prussians? It is impossible to deny that the twenty-year-
long Bonapartist farce has caused enormous demoralisation.
One is scarcely justified in counting on revolutionary heroism.’
In the middle of August Engels still believed that the position
of a revolutionary government, if it came soon, need not be
desperate; but it would have to abandon Paris to its fate and
continue the war from the south. It might still be possible to
hold out until fresh munitions had been procured and new
armies organised with which the enemy might gradually be
forced back towards the frontier. But five days later Engels
believed that even that possibility had vanished. ‘If a revolu-
tionary government had been formed in Paris as late as last
week,’ he wrpte to Marx, ‘something might still have been
done. Now it is too late, and a revolutionary government
can only make itself ridiculous, as a miserable parody of the
Convention.’
The revolution was bound to come. That was certain. But
Marx was just as certain that its victory in Paris could only
follow defeat at the front. His certainty on this point explains
the silence of the manifesto.
The French sections of the International did not allow them-
selves to be carried away by the wave of patriotic enthusiasm
that swept the country upon the outbreak of war. Their
hatred of Napoleon alone was sufficient to preserve them from
that. For them to have wanted the Emperor to win the war
THE FRAN CO-PRUSSIAN WAR 307
and thus consolidate Bonapartism would have been incon-
ceivable; and they did not believe he would win, for the
weaknesses of his system were too familiar to them. The policy,
as usual unremitting in the invention of falseht>od, alleged
that cheers for Prussia had been called for at peace meetings
just before the outbreak of war. Such meetings were held in
places, and it became necessary to forbid patriotic demonstra-
tions in the suburbs of Paris, because they •occasionally de-
veloped into demonstrations the very reverse of patriotic. It
is quite possible that some crank, conceiving himself to be a
revolutionary, may actually have called for a cheer for the
Prussians, but it is certain that the workers who adhered to the
International had no love for Bismarck, however much they
despised Napoleon. Disunited as the French Socialists were-i-
the c Internationaux de la derniere heure ,’ as the ‘Old 5 International-
ists remarked, only served to bring more differences into the
ranks — they certainly did not want a Prussian victory at the
expense of France. Enslaved, humiliated and oppressed as
their country might be at the hands of an iniquitous govern-
ment, it nevertheless remained the country of the revolution,
the heart of Europe, now and for the future. They did not
believe in Napoleon, but they believed in France and France’s
mission.
Bakunin, who at this time was held in high regard by the
members of the International in France, thought as they did.
Nay more, he was an almost ideal embodiment of French
revolutionary patriotism. Like Marx, he considered that
indifference in international conflicts was pseudo^radical and
could only be harmful to the revolution. Like Marx, he
demanded the intervention of the proletariat to the full limit
of its strength. But, unlike Marx, he regarded Germany and
not Russia as the enemy and the chief bulwark of reaction; and
Bakunin did not just mean contemporary Germany; in his
eyes Germany had been the hub and pattern of despotism for
centuries, ever since the Reformation and the suppression of
the peasant risings in the first third of the sixteenth century.
Though there were other despotic governments even more
brutal than the German, that fundamental truth was not
affected in his eyes, because ‘Germany had made a system, a
religious cult, 0/ what in other countries was only a fact . 5 It
308 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
was a feature of the German national character. Bakunin
liked quoting the saying of Ludwig Borne that ‘other people are
o^en slaves, but we Germans always lackeys.’ He called the
servility of tiie Germans a natural characteristic which they
had elevated into a system, thus making of it an incurable
disease. If the Germans, condemned to slavery themselves
and spreading the plague of despotism wherever they went,
were to conquer “France, the cause of Socialism would be lost
and all hope of a revolution in Germany — a hope that in any
case could only be justified by a spirit of optimism that ran
counter to all experience — would have to be buried for at
least half a century, and France would be threatened with the
fate of Poland.
♦ Even before the war had properly begun he believed, as
Marx did, that Napoleon’s defeat was inevitable; but he did
not regard the defeat of France as inevitable, that is, assuming
she bethought herself and a revolution broke out in time. A
revolution and a revolution alone could save France, Europe
and Socialism. The French, above all the workers, must rise,
trample Bonapartism in the dust and liurl themselves at the
enemy of France and of civilisation with the all-compelling
enthusiasm of a revolutionary nation. In converting the
imperialist war into a revolutionary one lay their only
hope.
Bakunin became intensely active as soon as war broke out.
His new activity was essentially a continuation of the old; it
consisted of organising militant groups and preparing armed
risings. Th^ war had put immediate insurrection upon the
order of the day. During the last days of July and the first
week of August Bakunin overwhelmed his friends in France
with letters, counselling them, encouraging them, urging them
to immediate action. On August 1 1 he mentions that he had
written twenty-three detailed letters to France that day. ‘I
have my plan ready,’ he said. The details of his plan are
unknown, but what they were it is not difficult to guess. On
August 8, revolutionaries, led by Bakuninists, seized the town
hall of Marseilles, and a rising in Paris was planned for
August 9. The ‘committee of action’ there consisted chiefly
of Bakuninists, and its leader, Pindy, was a prominent member
of Bakunin’s secret organisation. But the result was a fiasco,
THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR 309
for on the morning of the ninth Pindy and his fellow-conspira-
tors were arrested.
Bakunin was not discouraged by these abortive attempts.
What did not succeed in one place must succeed in another —
must succeed. For time was racing by and the German army
was relentlessly advancing into France. ‘If there is no popular
rising in France within ten days, France is lost,’ he wrote to
his friends, almost in desperation. ‘Oh, if I were young, I
should not be writing letters but should be among you. 5
Danton’s words were constantly upon his lips. ‘Avant de
marcher contre Vennemi , il faut le detruire , le paralyser derriere soi. n
On August 14 Blanqui and some of his followers carried out
an attack on the police barracks in the Grande Rue de la
Vilette. Their cry: ‘ Vive la Republique! Mort aux Prussians!
Aux armesP was greeted with silence by a gaping throng. The
rising collapsed pitifully.
News of the disaster of Sedan reached Paris on September 4;
one hundred and twenty-five thousand men had been taken
prisoner, six hundred guns had been captured and the Emperor
had surrendered to the Prussians. The Empire collapsed with-
out raising a finger in its own defence. A Republic was pro-
claimed in Paris, and the provinces, in so far as they had not
anticipated Paris, followed suit.
Napoleon left the Republic a fearful heritage. The enemy
was in the land, the armies were in disorder, the exchequer was
bare. Marx’s anxious query about the future was destined
soon to have an answer.
On the night of September 5 Marx received a telegram from
Longuct: ‘Republic proclaimed.’ The names ot the members
of the Provisional Government followed, with the words:
Influence your friends in Germany immediately. He need not
have added this injunction. The manifesto of the Paris
sections of the International, which Marx received next day,
was not calculated to make him hurry. On the contrary, it
merely repelled him as being ‘ridiculously chauvinistic,’ with
its demand that the Germans promptly withdraw across the
Rhine — as if the Rhine could possibly be the frontier. But it
was not a question of criticising inept phraseology or the style
1 Before marching against the enemy, it is necessary to destroy, to paralyse the
enemy behind one.
310 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
of a well or ill-written manifesto now. This was no time for
historical Analyses. On September 6 Marx addressed the
General Council on the fundamental alteration in the European
situation brought about by the downfall of Napoleon in France.
Thanks to the tremendous authority he exercised on the
General Council, he succeeded in persuading it to acknowledge
the young French Republic, in spite of the hesitation and
vacillation of some of its English members. It was decided
that the new situation merited the issue of a second manifesto.
This was also written by Marx, with the assistance of Engels
in those passages which dealt with military matters. It was
published on September 9.
The main theme of the manifesto, on which all the rest
depended, was this; after Sedan Germany was no longer waging
a war of defence. ‘The war of defence ended with the surrender
of Louis Napoleon, the capitulation of Sedan and the procla-
mation of the Republic in Paris. But long before these events
occurred, at the very moment when the whole rottenness of the
Bonapartist armies was revealed, the Prussian military cama-
rilla set its heart on conquest.’ To refute the alleged necessity
of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine for the defence of Germany
Marx used arguments with which Engels supplied him. These
were convincing, but they were only calculated to make an
impression on military experts. The chief emphasis lay in the
political argument, which made the General Council’s mani-
festo the most significant document of the time.
With the victory and the consequences that threatened to
follow in its wake Russia, from being a shadowy figure lurking
in the background, came to the fore in a fashion that grew
ever plainer and ever more menacing. Marx saw it, and did
all that was in his power to make it visible to the world. But
in Germany he was talking to men who were dazzled and
blinded. Russia was far away, but Strasbourg was near, near
enough to seize, and they seized it. ‘Did the Teuton patriots
really believe,’ the manifesto said, ‘that Germany’s indepen-
dence, freedom and peace would be assured if they forced
France into the arms of Russia? If the success of German arms,
the arrogance of victory and dynastic intrigues drive Germany
to rob France of French soil, only two ways remain open to
Germany. She must either become a conscious vassal of
THE FRAN CO-PRUSSIAN WAR 3 1 I
Russia’s plans for self-aggrandisement, with all the risks that
that involves — a policy that corresponds to Hol/enzollern
traditions — or, after a short rest, arm for a new “defensive”
war, not one of these new-fashioned “localised” ^wars, but-^a
war against the allied Slav and Latin races.’ A week after
Sedan Marx clearly delineated the main lines that German
foreign policy was to follow up to the outbreak of the Great
War; first the ‘friendship’ with Russia that Bjsmarck fostered,
followed by preparations for war against the Franco-Russian
entente that began as soon as that friendship was dissolved. A
few sentences Marx wrote to his friend Sorgc on September 1,
1870, bear brilliant witness to his foresight. ‘What the Prussian
donkeys don’t see,’ he wrote, ‘is that the present war leads just
as necessarily to war between Germany and Russia as the w^r
of 1866 led to war between Prussia and France. That is the
best result that I expect of it for Germany. “Prussianism” as
such has never existed and cannot exist other than in alliance
and in subservience to Russia. And this War No. 2 will act as
the yvet-nurse of the inevitable revolution in Russia.’ Forty-
four years later Germany went to war with Russia and France,
in 1917 revolution, unleashed by the war, broke out in Russia,
and in 1918 the semi-feudal military might of Prussia collapsed.
Marx was not deceived as to the weakness of the German
workers’ movement and its inability to prevent the approaching
catastrophe. ‘If the French workers were unable to check the
aggressors in the midst of peace, have the German workers a
better prospect of checking the victor in the midst of the clash
of arms?’ he wrote. Nevertheless, however difficult the position
of the German proletariat might be, he believed *it would do
its duty.’
The fall of Louis Bonaparte opcited up new and tremendous
prospects to the French working classes. The General Council
sent its greetings to the young Republic — to the Republic and
not to the Provisional Government of National Defence. The
mistrust felt for the latter in revolutionary circles was not mis-
placed. It consisted partly of avowed Orleanists, partly of
‘middle-class Republicans, on some of whom the insurrection
of June, 1848, had left an indelible mark.’ Suspicion of the
Orleanists, who occupied all the most important positions and
regarded the Republic as but a bridge to the Restoration, was
312 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
well-founded. Nevertheless, or rather for that very reason,
Marx decided that the most pressing duty of the French
workers was to support and defend the young Republic in
spLe of all itf} defects. The situation was full of dangers and
full of temptations, requiring the most extreme caution and the
most courageous initiative, iron self-control and all-daring
heroism.
The struggle \yas no longer between Louis Napoleon, that
‘commonplace canaille ,’ and a Germany which was on the
defensive; republican France was now defending herself
against rapacious German militarism. The manifesto called
on the workers of France to do their duty as citizens. Their
duty was to defend the French Republic against the invading
Germans. ‘Any attempt to overthrow the new Government
with the enemy at the gates of Paris would be a desperate act
of folly.’ But at the same time it was obvious that the French
working class must not forget its own class duties, and the
General Council bade it exploit the favourable opportunity of
forwarding its own interest to the extreme. Eugene Dupont,
the representative of the French sections on the General
Council, wrote to the Internationalists at Lyons: ‘The bour-
geoisie still have the power. In these circumstances the role of
the workers, or rather their duty, is to let the bourgeois vermin
make peace with the Prussians (for the shame of doing so will
adhere to them always), not to indulge in outbreaks which
would only consolidate their power, but to take advantage of
the liberty which circumstances will provide to organise all the
forces of the working class. . . . The duty of our association
is to activate and spread our organisation everywhere.’ Six
weeks later he wrote once more to Chavret at Lyons: ‘The role
(of the International) is to take advantage of every opportunity
and every occasion to spread the organisation of the working
class.’
‘Restraint on the part of the International in France until
after the conclusion of peace,’ as Engels put it, was far from
meaning that the French workers were to go on quietly and
calmly organising as if they were living, say, in Belgium or in
England or as if the date were still 1869. Their task was not
only to participate actively in the struggle against the invaders
and to continue the building up of their organisation. Marx
THE FRANCO - PRUSSIAN WAR 313
highly praised what the members of the International did at
Lyons before Bakunin ruined everything there. OA October
1 9, 1870, he wrote to Beesly, saying that under pressure of the
local section of the International a Republic hacj been set^p
before Paris took that step, and a revolutionary government
immediately established; a commune, consisting partly of
workers belonging to the International, partly of middle-class
Radical Republicans. The octroi had b<^en immediately
abolished, and rightly so. The Bonapartist and clerical
intriguers had been intimidated and energetic steps were taken
to arm the whole population. Activity of this kind was far
more than mere work of organisation; it meant that working-
class organisations were actively co-operating in introducing
and consolidating the Republican regime; and this was the
only way the working-class movement could grow, by co-
operating in shaping the country’s destiny. Independent
action of the working class must be postponed till later, until
after the war was over and the necessary work of preparatory
organisation had been done. Engels went so far as to stress
the fact that the working class ‘would need time to organise’
even after the conclusion of peace. Hence it was impossible
to decide in advance what form its future action might take.
‘After the conclusion of peace,’ Engels wrote in a letter to
Marx on September 12, ‘the workers’ prospects in every
direction will be brighter than ever before.’ A remark in the
same letter that ‘not much fear need be entertained of the
army returning from internment from the point of view of
internal conflicts’ indicates that he reckoned on the possibility
— not the probability and definitely not the inevitability — of an
armed struggle. In the same letter he warned the workers
against any action during the war. ‘If one could do anything
in Paris,’ Engels wrote, ‘the thing to do would be to prevent
the workers from striking until after the peace. Should they
succeed in establishing themselves under the banner of national
defence, they would take over the inheritance of Bonaparte
and the present wretched republic, and would be vainly
defeated by the German armies and thrown back again for
twenty years. . . . But if they do not let themselves be carried
away under the pressure of foreign attacks but proclaim the
social republic on the eve of the storming of Paris? It would
314 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
be dreadful if the German army’s last act of war were a battle
with the Workers at the Paris barricades. It would throw us
back fifty years, put everyone and everything into a false
poV/tion, and, the national hatred and the demagogy that
would take hold of the French workers! In this war France’s
active power of resistance is broken and with it goes the
prospect of expelling the invaders by a revolution.’
For France the,, war was lost. He who continued it would
be beaten and must humble himself before the victor. All
other considerations must recede before that one decisive fact.
The military situation alone forced the workers to hold back
at least until the conclusion of peace. The manifesto warned
them ‘not to let themselves be swayed by national memories
0^1792 as the French peasants had let themselves be deceived
by national memories of the First Empire. Theirs was not to
repeat the past but to build the future.’ The argument sounded
well, but if it had any validity it was but a secondary one. In
the middle of August Engels had said that any government
that tried to repeat the Convention would be but a sorry
parody of it. After the Battle of Sedan a revolutionary war in
the manner of 1792 seemed completely impossible. A letter
of Marx’s to Kugelmann, written on February 14, 1871, makes
it clear that his attitude was determined by this estimate of the
war situation. ‘If France holds out, uses the armistice to
reorganise her army and gives the war a real revolutionary
character — and the crafty Bismarck is doing his utmost to this
end — the great new German Borussian empire may still
receive the baptism of a wholly unexpected thrashing.’ To
give the war a revolutionary character would be to repeat the
Convention. In September, 1870, it would have only have
been a miserable parody of the Convention. ‘To sacrifice the
the workers now,’ Engels wrote to Marx on September 7,
‘would be strategy d la Bonaparte and MacMahon.’
While Marx did all he could to prevent the workers from
attempting to overthrow the Provisional Government while the
war lasted, Bakunin and the ‘Jacobins’ held the overthrow of
the Provisional Government to be their most pressing task.
The ‘Jacobins,’ students, intellectuals, and declasses of all sorts,
seized on the traditions of the French Revolution — not so
much those of the Jacobin clubs, for many of them considered
THE FRAN CO-PRUSSIAN WAR 315
Robespierre to be an irresolute weakling, as to those of the
Hebertists. Many of them had vague Socialist ideas* and all
of them every day went politically a step farther Left than the
day before. They were conspirators by tradition ^nd inclined
tion, completely unorganised as a group or even as a party;
but they were united by that mental kink exhibited in its
purest form by the Bohemians of the Left Bank, who were in
revolt against absolutely everything. .
In the history of London’s political exiles in the sixties the
‘Jacobins’ did not play a very honourable role. Such of them
as had formed a special ‘French branch’ of the International
soon came into violent conflict with the General Council.
Anyone who worked for the International in France was
immediately suspect in their eyes. Such a person was bound
to have inclinations towards Bonapartism, if he were not
actually an agent of Napoleon. Felix Pyat, Vesinier, and
others of their leaders outdid each other in radicalism. Tyranni-
cide was their ideal. Pyat constantly drank toasts to ‘the bullet
that will slay a tyrant,’ and he opened a subscription to buy a
‘revolver of honour’ for Beresovsky, the Pole who made an
attempt on the life of Alexander II in Paris in 1867, and
indulged in many similar pranks. Though not himself a
member of the ‘French branch,’ he used it as his platform and
behaved as though he were the living embodiment of the
International itself. The behaviour of this irresponsible
would-be politician, which in other circumstances would have
been nothing but a bad joke, became a matter of occasionally
serious embarrassment for the International. The General
Council had repeatedly to announce that Pyat and his friends
had nothing to do with them. It could not allow legal organisa-
tions on the Continent to be jeopardised by Pyat’s ranting.
Marx had bitter contempt for Pyat, the ‘mountebank of 1848,’
and ‘these heroes of the revolutionary phrase, who, from a safe
distance of course, kill kings and emperors and Louis Napoleon
in particular.’
The news of the fall of the Empire turned these people’s
heads completely. ‘The whole French branch has set off for
Paris to-day,’ Marx wrote to Engels on September 6, 1870, ‘to
commit imbecilities in the name of the International. They
wish to overthrow the Provisional Government, proclaim the
316 KARL MARX.* MAN AND FIGHTER
Paris Commune, appoint Pyat French ambassador in London,
etc. 5 Al Marx considered this an extremely dangerous enter-
prise he sent Serraillier to Paris after the Jacobins to warn
people of t^e danger of insurrectionary action.
Bakunin did not lag behind them in zeal. The seed he had
sown so carefully seemed to have ripened now. The moment
had come to strike. All the old powers had collapsed; and
there was only # one way to save France now, Bakunin’s way,
anarchism. An uprising of popular passion would achieve
both victory over the external enemy and the complete re-
organisation of society. The two were inseparably united in
his eyes. Bakunin left Switzerland on September 14. The
difficulty he had in raising money for the fare cost him several
valuable days, or so he feared. With a Pole and a former
ttussian officer as his travelling companions he went to Lyons,
where his most devoted followers lived. At first there were
only a very few who were willing to follow him, but he suc-
ceeded in winning over the hesitaters and the doubters. Two
days after his arrival he wrote to Ogarev: ‘The real revolution
has not yet broken out here, but that will come. Everything
is being done to prepare it. I am playing for high stakes.
I hope to see the triumph soon.’ A week later he was as good
as certain of the victory of his cause: ‘To-night we shall arrest
our principal enemies; to-morrow there will be the last battle
and, we hope, victory.’ On September 28 Bakunin and his
followers seized the town hall of Lyons and proclaimed a
revolutionary Commune. Paragraph 1 of the first decree
stated: ‘The administrative and governmental machinery of
the state, Having become powerless, has been abolished.’ But
with this the revolutionary energy of the Lyons Bakuninists was
exhausted. The venture collapsed pitifully after a few hours,
and Bakunin only just managed to escape. In other towns,
as in Marseilles, where Bakunin tried again, and in Brest, where
his followers went to work, things did not even get as far as
that.
When Marx learnt of Bakunin’s adventures in Lyons he was
indignant. ‘Those asses have ruined everything,’ he wrote to
Beesly. Belonging as they did to the International, the
Bakuninists, Marx stated, unfortunately had sufficient influence
to cause his followers to deviate. Beesly would understand,
THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR 3 1 7
Marx added, that the very fact that a Russian — represented
as an agent of Bismarck by the middle-class newspapers
— had the presumption to impose himself as the leader of a
French Committee of Public Safety was quite sufficient to s\^ay
the balance of public opinion. It would have been difficult
indeed to have saved France by decreeing the abolition of the
state at a moment when she was engaged in a life and death
struggle with a terrible enemy whose demands were increasing
from day to day.
The fair words spoken by the King of Prussia at the beginning
of the war — as usual, he had invoked God as his witness and
declared that he was fighting Napoleon but not the people of
France — were now completely forgotten. Anyone who dared
remember them was denounced as a traitor. When tjie
‘Eisenacher 5 party committee issued a proclamation to the
workers protesting against the Prussian plans of conquest and
demanding an honourable peace with the French Republic,
a general had them arrested and led away in chains. The
Government Press described the demand that a King of Prussia
should keep his promises as ‘ingenuous. 5
France defended herself desperately. All revolutionary
elements everywhere were on her side. Old Garibaldi hurried
to the assistance of the French Republic with a legion of
volunteers. It was necessary to help her from without.
Immediately after the proclamation of the Republic in Paris
the General Council set itself at the head of the movement that
demanded that Great Britain should recognise it. On Sep-
tember 1 o a great workers 5 meeting in St. James’s Hall demanded
recognition of the French Republic and the conclusion of an
honourable peace. The latter demand was closely associated
with and indeed followed from it. Demonstrations increased
during the winter months and at the turn of the year a large
number of bourgeois politicians joined the pro-French front.
Not satisfied with diplomatic intervention, they actually claimed
that the time had come for British military intervention as well.
Marx ? as a foreigner, could not come forward publicly himself^
so the campaign of meetings was led by Odger, an English
member of the General Council. But Marx seized every
opportunity of action that came his way. In January, 1871,
he learned of the difficulties of the German army in France
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
from an informed source, namely Johannes Miquel, a high
Prussian official who had been a member of the Communist
League. Marx saw to it that the news was transmitted to the
Government fof National Defence through Lafargue. For, as
Marx once more stated in an open letter to Bismarck in the
Daily News of January 19, 1871, ‘France was now fighting not
only for her own independence but for the liberty of Germany
and of Europe.’ « The General Council of the International
was behind a mass demonstration in Trafalgar Square on
January 23, to which the workers marched carrying the
tricolour.
Engels energetically pleaded France’s cause in articles in
the Pall Mall Gazette. He denounced the brutal retaliatory
measures the Prussians took against the francs-tireurs . There
was an answer to these methods, he said. ‘Wherever a people
allowed itself to be subdued merely because its armies had
become incapable of resistance it has been held up to universal
contempt as a nation of cowards,’ he wrote, ‘and wherever a
people did energetically carry out this irregular resistance, the
invaders very soon found it impossible to carry out the old-
fashioned code of blood and fire. The English in America,
the French under Napoleon in Spain, the Austrians in 1848
in Italy and Hungary, were very soon compelled to treat
popular resistance as perfectly legitimate, from fear of reprisals
on their own prisoners.’ Engels tried to convince the British
that military intervention need only be on a very small scale
to succeed. ‘If thirty thousand British soldiers landed at
Cherbourg qr Brest and were attached to the army of the
Loire, they would give it a resolution unknown before.’ He
followed the heroic resistance of the raw French armies with
great sympathy, and with more than sympathy.
Engels sent to Gambetta’s secretary, through Lafargue, a
memorandum containing a carefully thought-out plan for
raising the siege to Paris. The original document has never
been discovered and may have perished in those agitated times.
But Engel’s executors, Bebel and Bernstein, found the pre-
liminary draft after his death and destroyed it, fearing the
possibility of its being used as evidence of ‘treason’ against
the German Social-Democrats. Bernstein refused to discuss the
matter during the whole of his lifetime, and that was the reason
THE FRAN GO - PRUSSIAN WAR 319
why that very remarkable document has practically never been
mentioned in print before. However, hints in memoirs, taken
in conjunction with Engels’s own statements in the articles he
wrote on the war, enable one to form a pretty accurate idea d£
what he proposed. His underlying idea must have corresponded
exactly with the plan that Bourbaki’s army tried to carry out
in December, 1870. The coincidence may have been more
than accidental. Engels became so enthusiastic>about his plans
that he actually wanted to go to France to offer his services to
Gambetta. Marx, however, was sceptical. ‘Do not trust these
bourgeois republicans, 5 he said to him, according to Charles
Longuet, ‘whether you are responsible or not, at the first hitch
you will be shot as a spy. 5
The General Council discussed the prospects of British inter-
vention. Short reports of meetings that appeared in a local
London paper, the Eastern Post , only give the barest outline of
Marx’s views. At the end of September he seems to have
regarded the prospects of British intervention as very slight.
Privateering, England’s most powerful weapon against the
Prussians, had been forbidden by the Declaration of Paris in
1856. But the situation changed on October 20, when Russia
denounced the Treaty of Paris as far as the Black Sea was
concerned. The transactions of the General Council on
January 1, 1871, show how Marx regarded the distribution of
forces then. Engels said that if England had declared war on
Russia after October 20, Russia would have joined forces with
Prussia. Austria, Italy and Turkey would have adhered to
the side of England and France. Turkey would have been
strong enough to defend herself against Russia, and Europe
would have expelled Prussia from France. Such a European
War would have meant the saving of France and Europe and
the downfall of absolutism. At a meeting on March 14 Marx
was still in favour of British intervention and a ruthless
privateering war. But by the middle of March the war was
over. Four days later the Commune was proclaimed in Paris.
On January 28 the Provisional Government had signed an
armistice with Prussia, in spite of Bismarck’s monstrous de-
mands. The population of besieged Paris was on the point of
starvation, all the French armies had been defeated, and all
prospect of the ^fortune of war changing seemed to have
320 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
vanished. Was there really no way of saving France from
dishonour? Had every possible thing been done? The Pro-
visional Government had been accused of indecision, cowardice
a\?vd even ^treachery before — treachery was the favourite
accusation the Bakuninists and Jacobins directed at ‘cette vermine
bourgeoise 5 — and hundreds of thousands of Paris workers and
members of the petty-bourgeoisie now started wondering
whether these accusations, which they had scarcely listened to
before, were not, perhaps, justified after all. They started listen-
ing to them with an attentive ear. Once more they turned over
in their minds all their dreadful experiences in those four-and-
a-half months of siege, and found much that was strange and
difficult to understand, and much that had never seemed very
plausible to them, though they had accepted it at the time as
military necessity, not intelligible to them with their limited
view over but a sector of the front. But now they suddenly
looked at everything with different eyes. It is known to-day
that after the Battle of Sedan it was absolutely impossible for
the French to have won the war without external aid. The
question whether a revolutionary war might or might not have
forced the Prussians to reduce their demands — Marx still
believed this possible as late as February — is scarcely one that
can be settled now. But one thing is known now. The
Parisians were justified in their suspicions. Paris was not
defended as it might have been. The military command was
crippled not only by disbelief in the possibility of success. There
were large sections among the officers who were bitterly
opposed to putting arms into the hands of the ‘rabble , 5 par-
ticularly the workers, for fear that though they might fight
against the external enemy to-day, to-morrow they might turn
their arms against the enemy within. And the more violently
the extremists agitated — the possessing classes regarded as an
extremist anyone who did not devotedly accept everything
that came from above — the more acute their fear of the future
became. The Prussians were their enemies to-day, but they
might be friends and allies in the revolution to-morrow.
Towards the end of the siege the most shameless of these people
made no more secret of the fact that they would prefer the
Germans to march in to having a revolution in Paris. Fear
of the imminence of insurrection was not the least of the factors
THE FRAN CO-PRUSSIAN WAR 321
that led the Provisional Government to conclude a^i armistice.
The Germans were perfectly well aware of this. Side by side
with the peace negotiations there took place negotiations
concerning the assistance that Bismarck migbrf: provide/ He
was prepared to release immediately as many French prisoners
as might be needed to refill the ranks of the c army of order/
and the Provisional Government pledged itself to disarm the
workers of Paris as soon as possible. RurrK>urs of this spread
quickly and intensified suspicion. From this to conviction of
the Provisional Government’s treachery to France was but
a step. The Bakuninists and their allies, the Jacobins, saw to it
that the step was taken.
This is not the place to write the history of the Paris Com-
mune. Spontaneous mass movements and the deliberate
actions of organised groups were so inextricably intermingled
that in spite of all that has been written about it and all the
research that has been done, the tangle has never been com-
pletely unravelled. But one thing is sure. The theory that
the March revolution in Paris was an entirely spontaneous
rising, entirely unorganised and unprepared, does not correspond
to the facts.
True, Bakunin, the arch-conspirator, took no part in it.
His strength was broken by the reverse he suffered at Lyons.
While still there he wrote to a friend in deep despair: ‘Farewell
liberty, farewell Socialism, farewell justice for the people, and
farewell the triumph of humanity!’ All his hopes of France
had been in vain. ‘I have no more faith in the revolution in
France/ he wrote at the end of October, 1870. ‘The country
is no longer revolutionary at all. The people has become as
doctrinaire and as bourgeois as the bourgeois. The social revo-
lution might have saved it, and the social revolution alone was
capable of saving it.’ The people had shown itself incapable
of embracing its own salvation. ‘Farewell all our dreams of
imminent emancipation. There will be a crushing and over-,
whelming reaction.’
Great as Bakunin’s influence on his friends was, on this
occasion they did not follow him — his friends in Paris in
particular. What bound them to him was not a thought-out
programme — to say nothing of a comprehensive interpretation
of society — but a will to action that flinched at no obstacles,
21
322 KARL MARX.* MAN AND FIGHTER
recognised f no obstacles; they were united less by community
of conviction than by community of mood; and moods in
besieged Paris were necessarily different from what they were
at ityons. Certainly Lyons had been a fiasco, and hard as it
might be, they must be better prepared next time. That was
what they thought in Paris. They did not rise but made their
preparations first. They regarded the incident at Lyons, which
had been a terrible blow to Bakunin, as but a preliminary
skirmish. Their battle was still to come. They drew up their
ranks. Their leader was Varlin.
He was not a particularly gifted speaker, but he set no great
store by oratory. An able organiser, energetic and clear-
sighted, he took up the cause of his class with complete devotion
and utterly without personal ambition. General Cluseret called
him ‘the Christ of the working class,’ a phrase that sounded
false only to those who did not know the details of his life.
The workers loved him as their best friend. His work on the
Marseillaise had brought him into contact with the revolutionary
intelligentsia, particularly with the leading men among the
Jacobins. With some of them he was on terms of personal
friendship and he was exceptionally fitted to re-establish
political liaison between them and the Bakuninists, to whose
ranks he himself belonged.
On September 4, 1870, Varlin was still in Brussels, to which
he had been compelled to flee to escape the attentions of the
Bonapartist police. On September 5 he made a speech to the
workers of Paris. He very soon resumed the prominent position
he had previously occupied in the Regional Council of the
International, and there was more than enough for him to do.
The minutes of the Regional Council’s meetings in January,
1871, i.e. after a period of three months’ intensive work, show
that a delegate complained that the sections had been broken
up and their members scattered — which gives an indication
of the state the Paris sections must have been in during the
first few weeks of the Republic. Another delegate was of the
opinion that the International had been wrecked by the events
that followed the proclamation of the Republic. In spite of
exaggerations, due to reaction after perhaps excessive hopes,
in the main these statements were correct. The International
in Paris did not develop along the lines that Marx had indicated
THE FRAN CO-PRUSSIAN WAR 323
for it. Difficult the task that confronted the leaders of the
Paris sections was — it was no light task, in the midst of the
feverish excitement of a besieged city, to attempt to persuade
members of the profoundly agitated and half-staf ving working-
class masses to join an organisation which was not concerned
with their immediate and most pressing interests. But excep-
tional as the obstacles were, some if not all of them might have
been overcome if Varlin and his comrades # had not set them-
selves aims which, though important, were less important than
the resuscitation of the sections. He who aimed at overthrowing
the Government of National Defence in the midst of war had
no time to lose with secondary things but had necessarily to
go straight forward towards his goal; and conferring with the
Jacobins on preparations for an insurrection was obviously
more important than the troublesome effort of trying to build
up the still weak sections of the International.
The most important revolutionary organisation in Paris was
the Central Committee of the twenty arrondissements , which
was intended from the first not merely to be a popular check
on the Government but to be a definite substitute for it when
the proper moment came. The Committee was in the hands of
the Bakuninists and their allies, the Jacobins, and its paper was
Le Combat , which was edited by Felix Pyat. There were plenty
of differences between the Bakuninists and the Jacobins, but
they faded into the background behind their common goal,
the overthrow of the Government and the setting up of the
revolutionary Commune. Bakunin at Lyons had associated
himself with General Cluseret, though he had^very soon re-
gretted the decision. But the Bakuninists in Paris remained
faithful to their alliance with the Jacobins almost to the last
day of the Commune. Little detailed information is extant
concerning the activities of the Central Committee. It had
contacts with Lyons, and General Cluseret went there on its
behalf, though it did not identify itself with Bakunin’s attempted
rising. But it did learn from it that the time to strike had not
yet come. A circular signed by Varlin and Benoit Malon
written at the end of 1 870 stated: ‘We are hurrying the organisa-
tion of our Republican committees, the first elements of our
future revolutionary communes. We are not neglecting to take
precautions against the scattered but menacing forces of
324 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
reaction. f We are organising our vigilance committees with
this end in view and we are planting the foundations of districts,
which were so useful in ’93. Our revolution has not yet come,
buVwe shall <make it, and, when we are rid of the Prussians,
we shall lay the foundations in a revolutionary fashion of the
egalitarian society of which we dream. 5
The armistice got rid of the Prussian millstone for them, or
so, at least, they* thought, and now the time for action had
come. The first task was to win over the National Guard, whose
numbers had grown enormously and whose composition had
fundamentally altered during the siege. Whereas previously
it had been an instrument of the possessing classes, scarcely
yielding in loyalty to the Imperial Guard itself, its ranks were
now filled with workers and members of the petty-bourgeoisie.
After the armistice Paris had a garrison of twelve thousand
regular troops, but there were two hundred and fifty-six
battalions of the National Guard. If they came over to
the side of revolution victory, at any rate in Paris, was
assured.
The National Guard had formed its own central committee.
Within a short time Varlin and his friends had succeeded in
gaining influence upon the battalions and the central com-
mittee. A meeting of the delegates of the National Guard was
held on March 10, 1871, and presided over by Pindy, the
Bakuninist who had attempted a rising on August 9 in the
previous year. One battalion after another declared itself for
the revolution. Varlin was full of confidence. P. L. Lavrov,
the Russian philosopher and revolutionary, who was living in
Paris and knew Varlin, describes in a letter a conversation he
had with him a few days before March 18. ‘Another week,
Varlin said, ‘and seventeen of the twenty arrondissements will
be ours; the other three will not be for us, but they will not do
anything against us. Then we shall turn the prefecture of
police out of Paris, overthrow the Government and France
will follow us. 5
Varlin had foreseen well. A Government attempt to take
away the rifles of the National Guard precipitated the outbreak
of the revolution by a few days. Nevertheless Varlin’s calcula-
tion was correct. On March 18 fifteen of the twenty arrondisse-
ments acknowledged the authority of the Central Committee
THE FRAN CO-PRUSSIAN WAR 325
of the National Guard; two hundred and fifteen, of the two
hundred and fifty-six battalions adhered to it. The Commune
was proclaimed in Paris.
‘The International did not raise a finger to rpake the Com-
mune,’ Engels later wrote to Sorge. Varlin was one of the two
secretaries of the Paris regional council; but his work for the
Commune was not done as secretary of the International. The
minutes of the meetings of the regional council during this
period have been preserved, and the mcagreness of references
to the movement, that led to the Commune is astonishing. To
Lavrov, who was comparatively a slight acquaintance, Varlin
made no secret of what was going forward, while at the same
time those delegates of the Regional Council who were not his
associates had no idea of what the morrow might bring fqrth.
On March 17, the day before the rising, a delegate wrote in
answer to Gambon, who wanted to know what the attitude of
the Regional Council was to the assembly at Versailles: ‘In view
of the obscurity of the political situation, the Regional Council,
like you, is in perplexity. What is to be done? What do the
people really feel at heart?’ All the same the organisers of
the Commune were leading Paris members of the International,
though the General Council in London did not ‘raise a finger.’
There is no reference in any documents or in any letter of Marx
or Engels, even in those of the most confidential nature, that
gives the slightest indication that the rising in Paris was
demanded, much less organised, by London.
But nevertheless, as Engels wrote in the same letter to Sorge,
the Commune was ‘unquestionably the intellectual child of
the International’; not because Marx and Engels declared
complete solidarity with Varlin and his Bakuninist comrades
or with the Blanquists or with Pyat and his Jacobins — they
knew practically nothing whatever about the activities of these
groups in February and the first half of March; not because
the Commune was ‘staged’ by the International, which it was
not; but because the Commune, with all the limitations of its
time and place, with all its illusions and all its mistakes, was
the European proletariat’s first great battle against the bour-
geoisie. Whether it was a mistake at that juncture to resort to
arms, whether the time was misjudged, the leaders deluded,
the means unsuitable, all such questions receded before the
326 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
fact that t^e proletariat in Paris was fighting for its emancipa-
tion and the emancipation of the working class. The latter
was the battle-cry of the International. Marx’s attitude to
the V^ommun^ was determined by that fact.
Unfortunately only a few of Marx’s utterances during those
months have survived, but all the indications available go to
show that from the first he regarded the Commune’s prospects
of success as very, slight. Oberwinder, an Austrian Socialist,
who later became a police agent, says in his memoirs that
‘a few days after the outbreak of the March rising in Paris
Marx wrote to Vienna that the course it had taken precluded
all prospects of success.’ The utmost that Marx hoped for
was a compromise, an honourable peace between Paris and
Versailles.
Such an agreement, however, was only attainable if the
Commune forced it upon its enemy. But this it failed to do.
‘If they succumb,’ Marx wrote to Kugelmann, ‘only their
kind-heartedness is to blame.’ On April 6 he wrote to
Liebknecht: ‘If the Parisians are beaten it looks as if it will be by
their own fault, but a fault really deriving from their excessive
decency.’ The Central Committee and later the Commune,
he said, gave the mischievous wretch, Thiers, time to centralise
the hostile forces (1) by foolishly not wishing to start civil war,
as though Thiers himself had not started it by his attempted
forcible disarming of Paris, and (2) by wishing to avoid the
appearance of usurping power, wasting valuable time electing
the Commune — its organisation, etc., wasted still more time —
instead of matching on Versailles immediately after the forces
of reaction had been suppressed in Paris. Marx believed the
Government would only consent to a compromise if the
struggle against Versailles — military, economic and moral —
was conducted with extreme vigour. Marx regarded as one
of the Commune’s greatest mistakes the fact that it treated the
Bank of France as a holy of holies off which it must piously
keep its hands. Had it taken possession of the Bank of France
it would have been able in case of need to threaten the country’s
whole economic life in such a fashion as to force the Versailles
Government very quickly to give in. Once civil war had
broken out it must be continued according to the rules of war.
But during the first few weeks the Communp conducted it
THE FRAN CO-PRUSSIAN WAR 327
sluggishly, and worse, in the face of an imminent attack it failed
to consolidate the position of its weak but important outposts
outside Paris. Even the steps taken in the rest of the country
to weaken the enemy at the gates of Paris wgre only half-
heartedly carried out, if not altogether neglected. ‘Alas! in
the provinces the action taken is only local and pacific,’ Marx
wrote on May 13 to Frankel in Paris. The action in the
provinces which Marx considered so necessary had, of course,
nothing in common with some adventurous plans which were
being hatched in Switzerland. There the old insurrectionary
leaders, J. P. Becker and Riistow, were planning an invasion
of the South of France by Swiss members of the International.
They believed they would carry the people with them and
rescue Paris. In other words they planned a repetition of
Herwegh’s expedition of 1 848. The ‘Legion of Internationalists’
would have benefited no one but the Commune’s enemies.
Becker complained later that ‘London’ would have nothing to
do with the enterprise, and ‘London’ meant Marx. When
the Commune was on the point of collapse Marx advised the
leaders with whom he was in contact to transfer ‘papers that
would be compromising to the canaille at Versailles’ to a safe
place. He believed that the threat of publishing them might
force them to moderation. All that Marx did, all the advice
that he gave, was directed to one end. ‘With a small amount
of common sense,’ he wrote ten years later to the Dutchman,
Domela Nieuwenhuis, ‘the Commune could have attained all
that was attainable at that time, namely a compromise that
would have been useful to the whole mass of the^ people.’
Bakunin, however, hoped not for a compromise but for a
heroic defeat. He had as little faith as Marx in victory
for the people of Paris. ‘But their deaths will not be in vain
if they do their duty,’ he wrote to his friend Ozerov at the
beginning of April. ‘In perishing let them burn down at least
the half of Paris.’ He could not contain himself with joy at
the thought of the day c ou le diable s'eveillera ’ and a bonfire
would be made of at least a part of the old world. At Locle,
where he was living at the time, he waited impatiently for
‘heroic’ deeds. One of his followers describes how ‘he foresaw
the Commune’s downfall, but what he wanted above all else
was that it should have a worthy end. He talked about it in
328 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
advance |tnd said: ‘My friends, is it not necessary that the
Tuileries be burned down? 5 And when the Tuileries were
burned down, he entered the group room with rapid strides —
thc<igh he generally walked very slowly — struck the table with
his stick and cried: ‘Well, my friends, the Tuileries are in
flames. I’ll stand a punch all round! 5 Bakunin had no con-
tacts with Paris. What happened there happened without him,
without his advice or help.
Marx’s opportunities of influencing the course of events in
Paris were not much better. The Paris Regional Council’s
messages to the General Council were more than meagre.
Towards the end of April Marx complained that the General
Council had not received a single letter from the Paris section.
Trpe, he had had a special emissary, the shoemaker Auguste
Serraillier, in Paris since the end of March, but Serraillier could
do nothing in the face of the ranting of the Jacobins. Pyat
and Vesinier were particularly prominent in this direction,
and the help which Serraillier besought of the General Council
did not avail him very much. The otherwise excellent and
enthusiastic Serraillier was not even adequate as a reporter,
and Marx learned practically nothing from him. The
difficulties of keeping up a regular correspondence between
London and blockaded Paris were, of course, very great. Marx
managed occasionally to smuggle information through to Paris
by making use of a German business man, and two or three
letters even reached Varlin and Frankel, the leading Com-
munards. But these only serve to demonstrate what is also
demonstrated by all the rest of the evidence; namely the small-
ness of the extent to which Marx was able to influence the
Commune. But he could at least work for it.
From the very first day, to quote Marx’s words in a letter
to Kugelmann, ‘the wolves and curs of the old society’ descended
in a pack upon the Paris workers; they lied, cheated, slandered,
no means were too filthy, no sadistic fantasy too absurd to be
employed. The Liberal Press yielded in nothing to the openly
reactionary Press, and Bismarck’s newspapers used the same
phrases as did Thiers’s papers and the great English Press.
And they were believed. Even those who otherwise looked
with favour upon the International wavered and wished to
repudiate the Paris ‘monsters.’ Even some^of the English
THE FRAN CO-PRUSSIAN WAR 329
members of the General Council objected to tfce General
Council’s defence of the Commune, in spite of the fact that in
England there was still some possibility of distinguishing the
true from the false. Other countries were entirely without
information. The General Council was overwhelmed with
inquiries from everywhere. Marx informed Frankel that he
wrote several hundred letters £ to all the corners of the earth
where we have connections, 5 and from time to time he managed
to get an article into the Press. But that was not sufficient by
far. The General Council had to proclaim the International’s
attitude to the Commune to the whole world.
Ten days after the rising Marx was instructed by the General
Council to write an address c to the people of Paris.’ But at a
meeting on April 4 it was decided temporarily to postpone
it, as on account of the blockade it would not have reached
those to whom it was addressed. It was also intended to issue
a manifesto to the workers of other countries, but this too was
postponed, and for two reasons. On April 25 Marx wrote to
Frankel that the General Council was still waiting for news
from day to day, but the Paris sections remained silent; and
the General Council could wait no longer, for the English
workers were waiting impatiently for enlightenment. Marx
was forced to toil through the English newspapers — French
newspapers only reached England very irregularly — to find
what he wanted. His notebooks during this period are full
of excerpts from the Press. Even the apparently least important
details were valuable to him; he kept them all and tried patiently
to form a picture of the great event that was happening from
the chaotic jumble of truth and half-truth and fiction that
confronted him. On top of these difficulties another one came
to hamper him. At a time when every ounce of his energy
was demanded he became ill. During the first half of May he
was unable to attend the meetings of the General Council;
he could only report, through Engels, that he was working
on the n^anifesto. On May 30, when at last he was able to
read his address, The Civil War in France , to the members
of the General Council, the Commune had already been
honourably defeated.
In that bloody week of May twenty thousand Communards
had been killed on the barricades, cut down in the streets by
330 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
the bloodthirsty Versailles troops, or massacred in the prison
yards. Tens of thousands of prisoners awaited death or
banishment. This was not the moment for writing an historical
treatise, a coql and dispassionate analysis and critique of the
Commune. The manifesto was no lament for the dead, no
funeral elegy, but a rapturous hymn to the martyrs of the war
of proletarian emancipation, an aggressive defence of those who
were slandered even in death. Never had Marx, the passion-
ate fighter, fought so passionately. One recalls his scepticism
at the beginning of the war. He had written that after twenty
years of the Bonapartist farce one was scarcely justified in
counting on revolutionary heroism. T he Commune had taught
him he was wrong. He looked on, astonished and overwhelmed
at Ttlie^elasticity, the historical initiative, the self-sacrificing
spirit of these Parisians.’ In a letter to Kugelmann he wrote:
‘After six months of starvation and destruction, at the hands
of internal treachery even more than through the foreign
enemy, they rose under the Prussian bayonets as though the
war between France and Germany had never existed and the
enemy were not outside the gates of Paris. History has no
comparable example of such greatness.’ The address hailed
Paris, ‘working, thinking, fighting, bleeding Paris, almost
forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the cannibals
at its gates — radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative.’
What had the Commune been accused of? Of acts of
terrorism? The shooting of General Thomas and Lecomte?
The execution of the hostages? The death of the two officers
‘was a summary act of lynch justice performed despite the
instance of some delegate of the Central Committee. . . . The
inveterate habits acquired by the soldiery under the training
of the enemies of the working class are, of course, not likely to
change the very moment these soldiers change sides . 5 But the
hostages were shot. Yes, that was true. ‘When Thiers, as we
have seen, from the very beginning of the conflict, enforced the
humane practice of shooting down the Communal prisoners,
the Commune, to protect their lives, was obliged to resort to
the Prussian practice of securing hostages. The lives of the
hostages had been forfeited over and over again by the con-
tinued shooting of prisoners on the part of the Versailles. . . .
The real murderer of Archbishop Darboy is Thiers.’ A week
THE FRANGO-PRUSSIAN WAR 33I
after the massacre of thousands of Communards cyticism of
the Terror was impossible. The observations in Marx’s note-
books show what he thought of the senseless actions of the
Jacobins. The address, without naming them, talked of people
who hampered the real action of the working classes, ‘exactly
as men of that sort have hampered the full development of every
previous revolution. They are an unavoidable evil; with time
they are shaken off; but time was not allowed the Commune.’
But although the Commune had no time to develop, although
it only remained ‘a rough sketch of national organisation,’ to
those who refused to allow their view to be obscured by
secondary things, it revealed its ‘true secret. 5 And that was
that ‘it was essentially a working-class government, the produce
of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating cl^ss,
the political form at last discovered under which to work out
the economical emancipation of Labour. The Commune,’ it
continued, ‘was the reabsorption of the State power by society
as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and
subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their
own force instead of the organised force of their suppression,
the political form of their social emancipation instead of the
artificial force (appropriated by their oppressors) of society
wielded for their oppression by their enemies. The form was
simple like all great things.’ The workers had no ideals to
realise, no ready-made Utopias to introduce by decree of the
people, but they had to set free the elements of a new society
with which the old collapsing bourgeois society was pregnant.
‘They know that in order to work out their own emancipation
and along with it that higher form to which present society
is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will
have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic
processes, transforming circumstances and men.’ These sen-
tences recall, even at times in their very phrasing, those that
Marx addressed to Willich and his followers — the Jacobins
of their time — after the final collapse of the revolution of 1 848
and 1849. He warned his followers against illusions, but his
warnings were not shackles put upon them, hampering them,
but gave power and strength and the unshakable conviction
of final victory. The address ended with these stirring words:
‘Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever
332 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its
martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class.
Its exterminators history has already nailed to that external
pifory from ( which all the prayers of their priests will not avail
to redeem them. 5 The final words were like the sounding of
the Last Trump
lost, but the wor
. The Commune was defe ated, a battle was
king-class struggle was continued^
CHAPTER XX
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL
Socialists in France in the sixties were either Proudhonists
or Blanquists, with here and there an isolated Saint-Simonist.
But there were no French Marxists. No t one in a hundred
members of the International in France knew that the leader
of t he General Council in London was a German name d Karj
Marx. In the other Latin countries the situation was the same,
The name of Lassalle meant a great deal to the German
workers, even to those who were not his followers. They &ng
songs about him and his picture hung upon the walls of their
rooms. The older generation in the Rhineland remembered
Marx from 1848, but that was nearly a quarter of a century
ago, and in the meantime most people had forgotten him. To
only a minute proportion of the younger generation did his
name mean anything at all. Not till the middle of the sixties
did this situation slowly and gradually begin to alter, but even
in 1870 his name was entirely unknown to the general public.
In England Marx was less known than anywhere else. Perhaps
here and there some Urquhartite or former Chartist could
recollect his name, but that was all. Marx, who had no wish
for popularity, set no store on his name being associated with
the International, and his signature, when it appeared under
any of the pronouncements of the General Council, was always
tucked in among those of many others. He spoke at practically
no public meetings, he wrote no signed articles, and sufficed
himself with the immediate task before him, that of ‘influencing
the workers’ movement behind the scenes,’ as he occasionally
wrote to a friend.
The Commune made him ‘the best calumniated and the
most menaced man of London,’ as he described himself (the
English phrase is his own) in a letter he wrote Kugelmann
in the middle of June, 1871. ‘It really does one good after
being stuck in the mud for twenty years,’ he added. He was
constantly pestered by ‘newspaper fellows and others’ who
wanted to see the ‘monster’ with their own eyes. For the man
333
334 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
behind the International, that gigantic conspiracy against the
whole world, who publicly declared his solidarity with its
atrocious misdeeds in Paris, must necessarily be a monster.
Tfye French Government was very well informed about the
International, and had had more to do with it than any other
government in Europe. It had staged great trials of its
members, set an army of spies after it and knew something of
Marx’s overwhelming influence on the General Council. On
the day after the proclamation of the Commune it had an
alleged letter of Marx’s to the French sections of the Inter-
national printed in Le Journal , containing the most violent
criticism of their political acts. The letter reproved them for
intervening in politics instead of confining themselves to the
social tasks which should have been their only concern. This
attempt to represent Marx as the good spirit of the ‘good’
International while the Communards were base renegades
sadly missed its mark, for no one in Paris took it seriously.
So the Versailles Government tried something else. On April 2
Le Soir announced that it had been authoritatively ascertained
that Karl Marx, one of the most influential leaders of the
International, had been private secretary to Count Bismarck
in 1857 and had never severed his connection with his former
patron. The Bonapartist papers spread this revelation through-
out France. So Marx was a hireling of Prussia, and the real
leader of the International was Bismarck, at whose instigation
the Commune had been set up. This story hardly tallied with
another, according to which the International was waging
a war on the whole of civilised humanity, which was the
reason why the Versailles Government requested and received
Bismarck’s help against the Commune. As Marx wrote to
P. Coenen at the end of March, word was spread to the whole
well-disposed Press of Europe ‘to use falsehood as its greatest
weapon against the International. In the eyes of these honour-
able champions of religion, order, the family and property
there is nothing in the least wrong in the sin of lying.’
It was necessary for the Versailles Government to disguise
the warfare it was waging upon the people of Paris. The Inter-
national was represented as the enemy of France and of the
French. Its chief, Karl Marx, was the enemy of the human
race. A flick of the hand and hey-presto! Bismarck’s agent
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 335
was converted into a kind of anti-Christ. But this elevation
of their political opponent, who after all really did exist in
human form, into the demoniacal sphere did not suit the
German philistines, who reduced him to more manage^le
proportions. Thus the Berlin papers invented a 1 fairy-tale of
how Karl Marx, leader of the International, enriched himself
at the expense of the workers he misled. This story was
subsequently often repeated. Soon afterwards the announce-
ment of Marx’s death in the Bonapartist L Avenir Liberal served
for a few days to relieve the terrified population of their night-
mare. But their relief lasted a few days only. The hated chief
of the hated International lived on. His name re-echoed across
Europe, through which the spectre of Communism once more
stalked abroad.
The Commune made a myth of the International. Aims
were imputed to it that it never pursued, resources were
ascribed to it that it never possessed, power was attributed to
it of which it had never dared to dream. In 1869 the report
of the General Council to the Bale Congress had poured
ridicule upon the alleged wealth with which the busy tongues
of the police and the wild imaginations of the possessing classes
had endowed it. ‘Although these people are good Christians,’
it stated, ‘if they had lived at the time of the origins of Chris-
tianity they would have hurried to a Roman bank to forge an
account for St. Paul.’ The panic of Europe’s rulers elevated
the International to the status of a world power. ‘The whole
of Europe is encompassed by the widespread freemasonry of
this organisation,’ said Jules Favre in a memorandum he sent
on June 6, 1871, to the representatives of France abroad,
directing them to urge the governments to which they were
accredited to common action against the common foe. Eng-
land declined the invitation, but Lord Bloomfield, the British
ambassador at Vienna, illustrating British concern, made
diplomatic inquiries with regard to the extent of the activities
of the International in the Austrian Empire. In the course of
Bismarck’s conversations with Count Beust, the Austrian
Chancellor, at Gastein, the subject of the struggle against the
International was discussed at length. Beust mentioned with
satisfaction in his memorandum that both Governments had
spontaneously expressed a desire for defensive measures and
336 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
common action against it, after the ‘sensational events that
characterised the fall of the Paris Commune, in view of its
expansion and the dangerous influence it is beginning to exert
oi> the working class and against the present foundations of the
state and society. The thought inevitably arises whether it
might not be well to counter this universal association of workers
with a universal association of employers, oppose the solidarity
of possession to, the solidarity of non-possession, and set up a
counter-International against the International. The power of
capital is still an assured and well-buttressed factor in public
life . 5
The situation, however, was not nearly so threatening as
some feared and others hoped. If Bismarck behaved to some
extent as though he were preparing to bow before the storm
of a Commune in Berlin, he was actuated less by fear of an
immediate outbreak than by his wish to frighten the Liberal
bourgeoisie from forming even the loosest of alliances with the
Socialist workers against the ruling Junkers. But in spite of
all exaggerations and over-estimates, whether entirely fabri-
cated or genuinely believed, one fact remained. Revolutionary
workers had remained in power in Paris for more than two
months. Whether the Commune had in every respect acted
rightly might justifiably be doubted, but the time for criticism
was not yet. One fact dominated everything else, and, in
Marx’s words, made the Commune ‘a new point of departure
of world-historical significance . 5 Workers had seized the power
for the first time.
Hitherto the International had concerned itself primarily,
though not of course exclusively, with economic matters such
as the shortening of the working day, the securing of higher
wages, supporting strikes, defence against strike-breaking, etc.,
and to the overwhelming majority of its members it had appeared
as an organisation aiming primarily at the improvement of the
economic position of the worker. But the situation had under-
gone a fundamental alteration now. History itself had placed
the proletariat’s struggle for the seizure of power upon the order
of the day. After the Commune it was impossible for the
International to continue to restrict itself to activities which
were political only by implication. It was necessary to convert
its sections from propagandist organisations an^l trade-union-like
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 337
groups into political parties. After the Communards had
fought on the field of battle it was impossible for the workers
of the International to revert to the narrow struggle for their
immediate economic interests in the factories and ijierely
draw public attention to themselves from tifne to time by
issuing a political proclamation from the side-lines, which
might be read or not. They must enter the political field
themselves, welded into a firm organisation, with a party that
openly proclaimed its programme — the seizure of the state
power by the working class as the preliminary to its economic
liberation. The conclusion the governments of Europe drew
from the Commune was that the International was a political
world-power, menacing to them all. The conclusion the
International drew from it was that it was the latter tha^they
must become.
With the ‘politicalising 5 of the International the function of
the General Council necessarily altered. In the past the
General Council had practically not interfered at all in the life
of individual sections, but now a thorough-going co-ordination
of their activities, though within definite limits, had become
imperative. That did not involve the assumption by the
General Council of a kind of supreme command over the
various sections, dictating to them from London the exact
details of what they were to do. It did, however, involve a
multiplication of the tasks devolving upon it, and the adoption
by it of an entirely different position from that which it had
adopted, and been compelled to adopt, in the past. And there-
with internal questions arose of which not even the preliminaries
had existed before.
Marx and Engels devoted the months that followed the
collapse of the Commune to the task of energetically re-
constructing the International. ‘The long-prepared blow, 5 to
use Marx’s phrase, was struck at a conference held in London
in the second half of September, 1874. In a number of
countries the sections of the International had not recovered
from the blows that had descended upon them as a result of
the war and its aftermath, and these countries were not
represented at the conference. That was the reason for the
summoning of a conference instead of a congress. On this
occasion Marx presided over the discussions of the International
22
338* KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
for the first time since 1865. He drafted a resolution con-
cerning the question of the political struggle, which had become
the central issue. The resolution observed that a faulty trans-
lation of the statutes into French had resulted in a mistaken
conception of the International’s position. The statutes pro-
visionally set up by the General Council in 1864 stated: ‘The
economic emancipation of the workers is the great aim to which
all political action must be subordinated as a means.’ (The
statutes were confirmed by the first Congress, held in 1866.
In the French version of the Congress report issued by the
Geneva section the words ‘as a means’ are missing. All the
other versions have them. Neither in the surviving minutes
of the Congress nor in the contemporary Press is there any
mer^ion of any alteration of the statutes. The fact that the
last two words are missing from the French version is un-
doubtedly an accident and possibly merely a printer’s error.)
The conference reminded the members of the International
‘that in the militant state of the working class its economic
progress and political action are indissolubly united.’
Previous Congresses had only dealt incidentally with internal
International affairs. At this conference, indicating the altered
situation, they played the leading role. The conference adopted
resolutions concerning the organisation of sections in those
countries in which the International had been banned, as well
as resolutions concerning the split in Switzerland, the Bakuninist
Alliance, and other matters. The policy of the International
Press was directed to be conducted along certain definite lines —
a thing quite unprecedented in the past. All the conference’s
transactions were aimed at strengthening the structure of the
International for the approaching political fray.
Marx, and Engels like him, believed that as soon as the period
of reaction, which could not but be brief, was over the Inter-
national was destined for a rapid and immense advance. For
this the London conference was intended to prepare the way.
But a year later the International was dead.
Of the two countries which had been its main support,
France’s withdrawal from the movement lasted not just for a
few months or for a year but for a full decade. The advance
guard of the French proletariat had fallen at the Paris barri-
cades or was languishing in prison or perishing ^in banishment
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 339
in New Caledonia. The small groups that survived were
insignificant. Those that were not broken up by the police
dissolved gradually of their own accord.
In the other of the two countries which had been the Inter-
national^ main support developments were unfavourable too.
In England the workers 5 movement had no need to be urged
to take the political road. Even before the reorganisation of
the International it had taken that road itself, and was now
pursuing definite if narrowly circumscribed political aims;
but at the very moment when it should have been marshalling
its ranks for a general attack on the power of the possessing
classes, it withdrew from the struggle. So many of its demands
had been granted that it started feeling satisfied. Stormy
meetings and uproarious demonstrations had demanded
universal suffrage, and universal suffrage had been attained.
England’s economic strides relieved the situation to such an
extent that the Government no longer had cause to fear the
consequences of reform. It was able to repeal a whole series
of legal enactments that imposed oppressive restrictions on the
trade unions, and this deprived the trade union leaders of yet
another impulse towards political action. After the collapse
of the Chartist movement only relatively small groups had
worked to revive an independent political movement among
the workers, and such a thing looked entirely superfluous now.
Many prominent trade unionists once more drew nearer to
the Liberals, who took advantage of the opportunity to make
the trade union cause their own; or at least acted as if they
did, though a debt of gratitude was certainly due to the
energy of the Radical Liberals, men like f^rofessor Beesly
and Frederic Harrison. In many constituencies Liberals
supported the candidature of trade union leaders. In these
profoundly altered circumstances not much attention was
paid to the General Council’s admonition to create an
independent political movement. Opposition to the General
Council, weak at first but definite nevertheless, reared its head
among the trade union leaders. Several other factors con-
tributed to this. Objection was taken to Marx’s definitely
pro-Irish attitude, and the General Council’s uncompromising
partisanship of the Commune was felt as inopportune and
disturbing by^ Labour leaders who had started associating
340 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
themselves with the ruling system and, though the influence
of this may at first only have been slight, in some cases had
become members of royal commissions.
Opposition to the General Council first expressed itself in a
demand for tfie formation of a special regional council for
England. This demand was thoroughly justified according
to the statutes. All the other countries had their own councils,
but up to 1871 the General Council served also as regional
council for England. This had come about quite spontaneously.
London was the headquarters of the International and no one
— least of all Marx — felt there was any necessity for a special
council for England apart from the General Council. He
formulated his reasons in a ‘confidential communication 5 at
the beginning of 1870. Although the revolutionary initiative
was probably destined to start from France, he stated, England
alone could provide the level for a serious economic revolution.
He added that the General Council being placed in the happy
position of having its hand on that great lever of the proletarian
revolution, what madness, they might almost say what a crime
it would be to let it fall into purely English hands! The English
had all the material necessary for the social revolution. What
they lacked was generalising spirit and revolutionary passion.
The General Council alone could supply the want and acceler-
ate the genuine revolutionary movement in that country and
consequently everywhere. ... If one made the General
Council and the English regional council distinct, what would
be the immediate effects? Placed between the General Council
of the International and the General Council of the Trades
Unions, the regional council would have no authority and the
General Council would lose the handling of the great lever.
This argument was as valid in the autumn of 1871 as it had
been in the spring of 1870, but in the meantime the centrifugal
forces in England had grown so strong that it was necessary
to make concessions if the International as a whole were not
to be jeopardised. The London conference decided that a
British regional council should be formed. The immediate
consequences appeared entirely favourable. The number of
British sections increased rapidly, and relations between the
regional council and the trades unions became closer and better.
On the other hand the General Council lost its influence in
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 34I
England, and within a short time it became evident that there
was a danger of the General Council severing its connection
with the International altogether.
Though there were some countries in which the strength of
the International had increased in 1870 and 1871, the result
of the withdrawal of France and the altered situation in
England was that it was extraordinarily weakened as a whole.
For the advance of the German workers 5 # movement and the
shifting of the centre of gravity across the Rhine was an
inadequate compensation.
These years saw the emergence in Germany of a workers 5
party which was the archetype and pattern of Continental
workers 5 parties up to the Great War. It approximated closely
to what Marx insisted should be the form of the political
movement of the proletariat, though it failed to fulfil his
demands in every way. Sharp, sometimes over-sharp criticism
appear in the letters Marx addressed to the leaders of the
German party. Nevertheless Marx on the whole approved of
the path that the German Socialists had struck out upon. He
approved of their work of organisation and propaganda, and
of their attitude in Parliament and to the other parties. The
party visibly grew from year to year and it was to be expected
that within a short time it would play a leading role in the
International. It never did so, for two reasons. The first was
the severity of the German legal restrictions on the right of
forming associations; the Government were constantly on the
watch for an opportunity of suppressing the German workers 5
party, and its leaders therefore assiduously ^avoided doing
anything that might have given them the opportunity of
doing so under cover of legal forms. In the second place the
German party was completely absorbed with its work in
Germany. The German Socialists proclaimed their complete
solidarity with the International, but that was practically
all. The German Party remained practically without
significance as far as the inner life of the International was
concerned.
Marx blamed Wilhelm Liebknecht for the ‘lukewarmness 5
with which he conducted the ‘business of the International 5 in
Germany. But it is doubtful whether anyone could have done
better than Liebknecht, who was absolutely tireless and was
342 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
completely devoted to Marx. After the London conference
Marx informed Liebknecht that the General Council wished
him to establish direct contact with the principal places in
Germany. This task Liebknecht had already begun. He
actually succeeded in forming sections in Berlin and other
towns. These, however, led a very precarious existence and
were not of much use to the General Council. In spite of all
the sympathy with which the German Socialists regarded the
International, they were prevented from helping the General
Council by the fact that they embodied in a pronounced
fashion the very thing which, in the eyes of its opponents, made
the General Council unworthy of continuing to lead the Inter-
national — namely ‘authoritarian Socialism/ For such acts of
‘subservience to the State 5 as participating in elections not only
failed to impress but actually went far to repel many members
of the International in those countries in which Bakunin’s
‘anti-authoritarian Socialism 5 was now triumphant.
The Commune had by no means corresponded to Bakunin’s
ideals. He had had no great hopes of it himself, and his friends
in Paris had had to acquiesce in actions that conflicted sharply
with what Bakunin demanded of a revolution. This, however,
did not prevent Bakunin from annexing the Commune for his
own ‘anti-authoritarian Communism 5 and declaring that
Marx’s ideas had been thoroughly confuted by it. The pitiful
end of the rising at Lyons had made him despair of the workers’
capacity for revolt, but the glow of the burning Tuileries once
more illumined the future in his eyes. So all strength and
passion had not yet departed from the world. The revolution
was not postponed into the indefinite future but was as
imminent as it had been before Sedan. It was bound to come,
soon, quite soon, perhaps to-morrow. To confine oneself to
petty, philistine ‘politicalising’ as the German Social Democrats
did was equivalent in Bakunin’s eyes to a renunciation of the
revolution. He resumed the work that he had interrupted for
some months, and started spinning his web of secret societies
anew. The Commune had made good the wrong done the
world by the triumph of Prussia, and the workers’ hatred of
the butchers of Versailles was a guarantee of ultimate victory.
That hatred must not be allowed to cool. Bakunin flung
himself zealously into his task. ,
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 343
The Latin countries, especially Spain and Italy, seemed to
him to hold out the most favourable prospects for the social
revolution. Spain had been the scene of a lively struggle
between Republicans and Constitutionalists since the expulsion
of the Bourbons in 1868. The Constitutionalisms intended the
vacant throne for some foreign prince. The struggle broke out
sporadically into civil war, and war to the death was declared
on the Catholic Church as the mainstay of reaction; and
everywhere the workers were stirring. Their new-won national
unity brought the people of Italy no peace. The struggle with
the dispossessed Pope kept the whole country on tenterhooks.
Workers and peasants were as near as ever to starvation in the
new kingdom that had been united after such suffering and
sacrifice, and the intellectuals were deeply disappointed by
what they had so ardently longed for. Bakunin rested his
brightest hopes upon Italy and Spain. Sparks from the burning
South would leap across into France, Belgium and Latin
Switzerland.
Of Germany Bakunin had no hopes whatever. His hopes of
that country had been weak before. Now, after the German
victory, he felt compelled to abandon them altogether. For
were the German Socialists not manifestly paying the state the
same idolatry as the German bourgeoisie? Where were they
when they should have been attacking the brutal victor,
Bismarck? What had they done to save the Commune? That
Bebel and Liebknecht had voted against war credits, that their
protest against the mad orgies of unleashed militarism had
caused them to be put on trial for high treason was forgotten
or did not count. In his struggle for domination of the
International Bakunin exploited with great skill the chauvinistic
anti-German under-currents that had been stimulated by, and
had survived, the war. Germany meant Bismarck, but it
meant Liebknecht and Bebel too. A German, citizen of a
country inclined to despotism by its very nature, was leader of
the General Council, and he was the inventor and advocate of
‘state socialism, 5 a conception that corresponded exactly with
the German temperament. The International was in the hands
of a Pan-German, and the ‘League of Latin and Slavonic
Races 5 must rescue it. In his private letters Bakunin placed no
bridle upon his hatred of the Germans, and fanned chauvinistic
344 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
inclinations to the utmost of his power, though in his public
utterances he was noticeably more cautious.
The situation in Europe was as favourable for Bakunin’s
renewed struggle for the control of the International as it was
unfavourable ‘for his conception of the social revolution.
Everything conspired to help him; the abstention of the
Germans, the chauvinism of the Latin countries, the back-
wardness of Italy and Spain, where revolutionary roman-
ticism flourished exuberantly because of the weakness of the
young proletariat and the strength of the old Carbonari
traditions.
Bakunin quickly realised the most effective way of conducting
his attack on the General Council. The most heterogeneous
elements could be united in an attack on Marx if they could
be given a single aim, namely the revocation of the decisions
of the London conference. The watchword of Bakunin’s
campaign was: Down with the General Council, who aim at
forcing the sections of the International into the political struggle
and usurping power over them. Down with the ‘dictatorship’
of the General Council!
The attack opened in Latin Switzerland, Bakunin’s surest
stronghold now as in the past. In 1870 there had been a split
between the ‘anti-authoritarians’ and the groups that adhered
to the General Council. The ‘anti-authoritarians’ had created
their own regional council and become a kind of international
centre of the Bakuninist movement. As soon as the decisions
of the London conference were known this regional council
summoned a regional congress to protest against them, and
more particularly against ‘the General Council’s dictatorial
attitude towards the sections. 5 The Congress met at Son-
villiers on November 12, 1871, and openly declared war on
the General Council. It addressed a circular to all the sections
of the International, skated cleverly over the fact that the
Geneva Council had assigned the working class the duty of
the conquest of political power and expanded itself at length
on the latter’s alleged attempt to dominate the sections. The
circular stated that it was a fact, proved by experience a thousand
times, that authority invariably corrupted those who exercised
it. ‘The General Council could not escape from that inevitable
law.’ The General Council wanted the principle of authority
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 345
introduced into the International. The resolutions carried by
the London conference, which had been irregularly and un-
constitutionally summoned, ‘are a grave infringement of the
General Statutes and tend to make of the International, a free
federation of autonomous sections, a hierarchicWal and authori-
tarian organisation of disciplined sections, placed entirely under
the control of a General Council which may at its pleasure refuse
them membership or even suspend their activities . 5 Finally the
circular demanded the immediate summoning of a general
Congress.
Bakunin’s posing as the advocate of complete sectional auto-
nomy was a clever move. The difficulties and inevitable
friction involved by the reorganisation of the International and
the transfer of the chief emphasis to the political struggle
created sympathy for Bakunin’s demands among groups that
otherwise had not the least use for his social-revolutionary
programme. Bakunin’s calculations now and subsequently
proved themselves to be entirely correct.
A private circumstance compelled Bakunin to open his
attack on the General Council soon after the London con-
ference, when his preparations were not so advanced as they
ought to have been. He knew that the Nechaiev affair had
been raised at the conference. The conference had authorised
the General Council to ‘publish immediately a formal declaration
indicating that the International Working Men’s Association
had nothing whatever to do with the so-called conspiracy of
Nechaiev, who had treacherously usurped and exploited its
name.’ In addition Utin, a Russian emigre living in Switzer-
land, was authorised to prepare a summariseef report of the
Nechaiev trial from the Russian Press and publish it in the
Geneva paper LEgalite .
The Nechaiev affair plays such an important role in
the history of the International, or rather in the history
of its decline, that it deserves to be recounted at some
length.
Nechaiev was the son of a servant in a small Russian pro-
vincial town. He put to such good use the few free hours that
his work as a messenger in the office of a factory left him that
he succeeded in passing his examinations as an elementary
school teacher. He starved and scraped until he had saved
346 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
enough money to go to St. Petersburg, where he had himself
entered as an external student at the university. In his first
winter term, in 1868, he entered the student movement, in
whicji his energy and the radical nature of his views soon
earned him prominence. But that was not enough for him.
He wanted to be foremost, and in order to enhance his repu-
tation as a revolutionary he started inventing stories of his
adventurous past. First he said he had been a prisoner in
the Peter and Paul Fortress. Then he added an account of
his daring escape. The majority of his listeners accepted all
this inquestioningly, and were filled with indignation at the
stories he told of his treatment by the prison warders, and a
students’ meeting was actually called and a delegation actually
approached the university authorities. Nevertheless there were
some who doubted. Some of the details of Nechaiev’s prison
experiences sounded improbable to the more experienced
among his colleagues, and the officials declared that Nechaiev
had never been under arrest.
Before this fact had been established, however, Nechaiev
illegally went abroad to make contact with the Russian emigre
leaders. He reached Geneva in March, 1869, and made the
acquaintance of Herzen and Ogarev, the patriarchs of the
‘emigration,’ as well as of the representatives of the younger
generation of refugees. He made an extraordinary impression
upon them all. Herzen, who had grown old, tired and
sceptical, said that Nechaiev went to one’s head like absinthe.
But the young student was not satisfied with praise and honour.
He added details of his own. He said that Russia was on the
eve of a tremendous revolutionary outbreak, which was being
prepared by a widespread secret society. Of this society he was
a delegate. And he repeated the story of his imprisonment
and flight. In Geneva also there were a few people who
refused to be taken in so easily. A number of tmigris had been
prisoners in the Peter and Paul Fortress themselves and knew
how impossible it was to escape, and letters came from St.
Petersburg from people who ought to have known, saying that
the secret society did not exist, or at any rate gave not the
slightest sign of its existence. But those who regarded Nechaiev
with suspicion belonged to groups who were hostile to Bakunin.
It was these who not long afterwards formed a ‘Russian
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 347
section’ of the International and made Marx their representative
on the General Council. This, however, cannot have been the
deciding factor in causing Bakunin to ignore their warnings.
He knew the Peter and Paul Fortress himself and knew — cquld
not possibly have helped knowing — that Nechaiev was a f liar.
But what did it matter? Lies could be useful in revolutionising
the slothful, and after all this Nechaiev was a marvellous fellow.
Bakunin wrote a regular panegyric about him in* a letter to
Guillaume, describing him as ‘one of those young fanatics who
hesitate at nothing and fear nothing and recognise as a principle
that many are bound to perish at the hands of the Government
but that one must not rest an instant until the people has
risen. They are admirable, these young fanatics — believers
without God and heroes without phrases!’ Bakunin and
Nechaiev became fast friends.
Bakunin did not apparently formally admit Nechaiev to his
secret society. The idea of his association with Nechaiev being
surveyed by its otherwise fully initiated members was an un-
comfortable one to him. The Bakunin-Nechaiev society was
a quite intimate super-secret society, such as the old conspirator
loved. Its object was the revolutionising of Russia.
In the spring and summer of 1869 Bakunin wrote as many
as ten pamphlets and proclamations, and Nechaiev had them
printed. Among them was the subsequently famous Revolu-
tionary Catechism , which was intended to be a reply to the
question of what were the best ways and means of hastening
the outbreak of the revolution in Russia. The answer was to
be found by the consistent application of two principles. The
first was ‘the end justifies the means’ and the second was ‘the
worse, the better.’ Everything — and by that Bakunin meant
everything without any exception whatever — that promoted
the revolution was permissible and everything that hindered
it was a crime. The revolutionary must concentrate on one
aim, i.e. destruction. ‘There is only one science for the
revolutionary, the science of destruction. Day and night he
must have but one thing before his eyes — destruction.’ That
was Bakunin’s own summary of the duties of a revolutionary.
Within the revolutionary organisation the strictest centralisa-
tion and the most rigorous discipline must prevail, and the
members must be completely subordinate to their leaders.
348 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
The object of this organisation was ‘to use all the means in its
power to intensify and spread suffering and evil, which must end
by driving the people to revolt. 5 The Catechism even defended
terrorism, which, however, it did not recommend against the
worst tyrants, because the longer such tyrants were allowed to
rage the better it would be for the revolutionising of the people.
Towards the end of the summer of 1869 Nechaiev travelled
illegally to Russia, taking with him a mandate from the
‘Central Committee of the European Revolutionary Alliance, 5
written and signed by Bakunin, recommending him as a
reliable delegate of that organisation. Bakunin had actually
had a special stamp prepared, with the words: ‘Office of the
foreign agents of the Russian revolutionary society Narodnaia
Rasprava. 5
Nechaiev remained in Russia for more than three months.
He succeeded in forming an organisation based on, or alleged
to be based on, the Revolutionary Catechism . Revolutionary-
minded young men were not so very difficult to find, and his
letter of recommendation, signed by Bakunin, whose name was
universally honoured, earned him the greatest respect. He
chose Moscow as his centre and it was not long before he had
gathered a group about him. Had he assigned it practical
aims and objects, its fate would have been the usual fate of
such organisations in Russia. It would eventually have been
discovered and dissolved by the police, but two or three new
groups would have arisen to take its place. To Nechaiev,
however, that would have appeared an idle pastime. He
wished his followers to believe that there was a secret revolu-
tionary committee which they must unconditionally obey, and,
true to the injunctions of the Catechism , he used every means
that tended to serve his aim. Once, for instance, he persuaded
an officer he knew to pose as a supervisory party official sent
from the secret headquarters on special duty. That ruse might
pass at a pinch. But Nechaiev did not shrink from even cruder
mystifications, so crude that he ended by perplexing some of his
own followers. Finally a student named Ivanov announced
to other members of the group that he no longer believed in
the existence of any committee, that Nechaiev was lying to
them and that he wished to have nothing more to do with
him. Nechaiev decided that the ‘criminal 5 must die. He
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 349
succeeded in persuading the rest of his followers that Ivanov
was a traitor and that only his death could save them. On
November 29, 1869, they lured Ivanov to a dark corner of a
park and murdered him. Ivanov defended himself desperately
and bit Nechaiev’s hand to the bone as he was ?tranglin£ him
with a shawl. Nechaiev bore the scar for the rest of his life.
The murderers were soon discovered and arrested, and only
Nechaiev succeeded in escaping abroad. •
Detailed reports of Ivanov’s murder appeared in the papers,
and the crime was remembered for many years. It armed the
Russian revolutionaries against Nechaiev-like methods.
Bakunin knew the whole story in detail, but it only en-
hanced Nechaiev’s reputation in his eyes. On learning that
Nechaiev had arrived in Geneva — he was living at Locarno
at the time — he leapt so high with joy that he nearly broke his
old skull against the ceiling, as he wrote to Ogarev. He
invited Nechaiev to Locarno, looked after him and was his
friend as before. ‘This is the kind of organisation of which
I have dreamed and of which I go on dreaming,’ he wrote to
his friend Richard. Tt is the kind of organisation I wanted to
see among you.’ At this time Bakunin had already started his
struggle against the General Council of the International on
the ground of its ‘dictatorial arrogance.’
To the same period there belongs the incident which, apart
from the other reasons, led directly to Bakunin’s expulsion
from the International. His financial position had always been
precarious, but in the autumn of 1869 he was in particularly
desperate straits. Through some Russian students who were
followers of his he was put into touch with a publisher who
offered him 1,200 roubles — far more than the author himself
ever got for it — for translating Marx’s Capital . Bakunin accepted
the offer gladly and received an advance of 300 roubles. He
did not show himself to be in any hurry to complete the task,
however, and three months later he had only done sufficient
to fill thirty-two printed pages. He readily let himself be
convinced by Nechaiev that he had more important matters
to fill his time and that he belonged to the revolution and must
live for the revolution only. So he laid the work aside and gave
Nechaiev full authority to come to an arrangement with the
publisher. Nechaiev set about this task in an inimitable
350 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
manner. It was impossible for Bakunin to communicate
directly with the publisher himself on account of the police,
and a student named Liubavin had undertaken to do so on
his behalf. The contract had been formally made out in
Liul&ivin’s na*ne and in the publisher’s books Liubavin was
nominally liable for the 300 roubles’ advance. One day
Liubavin received a letter bearing the stamp of Nechaiev’s
organisation. Its most remarkable passages are quoted
below*.
‘Dear Sir, — On behalf of the bureau I have the honour
to write to you as follows. We have received from the
committee in Russia a letter which refers among other things
to you. It states: “It has come to the knowledge of the
coffimittee that a few young gentlemen, dilettanti Liberals,
living abroad, are beginning to exploit the knowledge and
energy of certain people known to us, taking advantage of
their hard-pressed financial straits. Valuable personalities,
forced by these dilettante exploiters to work for a day-
labourer’s hire, are thereby deprived of the possibility of
working for the liberation of mankind. Thus a certain
Liubavin has given the celebrated Bakunin the task of
translating a book by Marx, and, exploiting his financial
distress just like a real exploiting bourgeois, has given him an
advance and now insists on the work being completed.
Bakunin, delivered in this manner to the mercy of young
Liubavin, who is so concerned about the enlightenment of
Russia, but only by the work of others, is prevented from
being able to work for the supremely important cause of the
Russian people, for which he is indispensable. How the
behaviour of Liubavin and others like him conflicts with
the cause of the freedom of the people and how contemptible,
bourgeois and immoral their behaviour is compared with
that of those they employ and how little it differs from
the practices of the police must be clear to every decent
person.
“‘The committee entrusts the foreign bureau to inform
Liubavin:
“‘(1) That if he and parasites like him are of the
opinion that the translation of Capital is so important to the
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 35 1
Russian people at the present time they should pay for it
out of their own pocket instead of studying chemistry and
preparing themselves for fat professorships in the pay of the
state. . . .
“‘(2) It must immediately inform Bakunin thaf in
accordance with the decision of the Russian revolutionary
committee he is exempt from any moral duty to continue
with the work of translation. ...” #
‘Convinced that you understand, we reqtiest you, dear sir,
not to place us in the unpleasant position of being compelled
to resort to less civilised measures. . . .
‘Amskiy,
‘Secretary to the Bureau. 5
Bakunin subsequently stoutly denied that he knew anything
of the contents of this letter, and there is every reason to believe
him. But when Liubavin sent him a letter indignantly pro-
testing against these threats, Bakunin, instead of talking to
Nechaiev about it, for he must have guessed who was behind
it all, took occasion to be offended at Liubavin’s intelligibly
not very courteous tone. He wrote to Liubavin that he pro-
posed to sever relations with him, that he would not continue
the translation and would repay the advance. He never did
repay the advance and must have known that he would never
be able to do so.
In Nechaiev’s opinion this species of blackmail was not only
permissible to a revolutionary but was actually demanded of
him. At every opportunity he threatened denunciation or the
use of force, and stole his opponents 5 letters in order to be able
to compromise them with the police. He shrank at nothing.
He caused revolutionary appeals to be sent to one of his greatest
enemies, a student named Negrescul, who was being kept
under police observation, and, as Nechaiev expected, the
material fell into police hands and Negrescul was arrested. He
succumbed to tuberculosis in prison and died a few months after
his release.
Bakunin knew what Nechaiev was capable of, as many
others did by this time, but he remained loyal to him as before.
Not till Nechaiev actually started threatening people whom
Bakunin held dear — Herzen’s daughter for instance — did
352 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Bakunin raise his voice against him. The final impulse that
caused Bakunin to break with him seems to have been provided
by Nechaiev’s plan to form a gang for the specific purpose of
robbing wealthy tourists in Switzerland. He even tried to force
Ogkrev’s stepson to join him, whereupon Bakunin protested.
At that Nechaiev appropriated a strongbox of Bakunin’s con-
taining correspondence, secret papers, and the statutes of his
revolutionary organisations — including the original manuscript
of the Catechism — and threatened Bakunin with publication
should he take any steps against him.
That was the end of Bakunin’s friendship with Nechaiev.
Bakunin was horrified at the practical conclusions that
Nechaiev drew from principles that he himself had helped him
to formulate. The story that Nechaiev told some of his
acquaintances, namely, that when he first came abroad he
was an ‘unspoiled, good and honourable youth’ and that it was
Bakunin who corrupted him, was, of course, not true. Nechaiev
had started his mystifications in Russia before his first journey
abroad. But Bakunin not only made no attempt to counter-
act Nechaiev’s inclinations, he actually encouraged them by
giving them a kind of theoretical foundation. Their quarrel
is not sufficient to obliterate the fact that Nechaiev was
very strongly influenced by Bakunin and that it was Bakunin
himself who evolved the theory by which all things were
permitted.
Not much more needs be said about Nechaiev’s further
career. He lived two more years abroad, first in London, then
in Paris and finally in Switzerland. He published more revolu-
tionary literature and threatened and blackmailed as before.
Bakunin refused to have anything nfore to do with him and was
so embittered against him that he would have liked to denounce
him as a ‘homicidal maniac, a dangerous and criminal lunatic,
whom it was necessary to avoid.’ Nechaiev was finally be-
trayed by a Polish emigre in the service of the police. He was
arrested in Zurich in the middle of August, 1872, and re-
patriated to Russia as a common criminal. On January 8,
1873, he was condemned to twenty years’ hard labour in the
mines of Siberia. He was not sent to Siberia, however, but
confined in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Such was his power
over people that he actually succeeded in winning over the
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 353
soldiers who kept guard over him, and they helped to put
him in touch with revolutionaries outside. He devised a plan
for seizing the fortress during a visit of the Tsar’s, but he was
betrayed by one of his fellow-prisoners and transferred to severe
solitary confinement. He died of scurvy on # NovemfcH?r 21.
1882.
Marx had been a close student of Russian affairs since the
fifties. At first he paid attention chiefly to Russian foreign
policy, but later he devoted himself with ever-increasing interest
to the social movement in Russia itself. At the end of the sixties
he learned Russian in order to be able to study the sources in
the original. The activities of Bakunin and Nechaiev attracted
his attention early. More detailed information was first sup-
plied him by Hermann Lopatin, a respected Russian revolu-
tionary, who settled in London in the summer of 1870 and
established close terms of friendship with Marx. Lopatin had
previously lived in St. Petersburg, where he had had the
opportunity of observing Nechaiev’s first steps at close quarters.
After his first conversations with Lopatin Marx wrote to
Engels: ‘He told me that the whole Nechaiev yarn is a mass
of lies. Nechaiev has never been in a Russian prison and the
Russian Government has never tried to have him murdered;
and so on and so forth.’ Lopatin was the first to tell Marx
of the murder of Ivanov. From the autumn of 1871 onwards
another Russian emigre , Utin, kept him informed of everything,
as we know to-day in all essentials correctly.
If the International were to survive it was necessary to purge
it of Bakunin and Bakuninism. It was no longer an abstract
question of ‘anarchy or authority.’ The International must
not be a screen for activities d la Nechaiev. Even if Bakunin
himself were incapable of drawing the practical consequences of
his own teaching, as Nechaiev had done, the Nechaiev affair
had demonstrated that people might always be found who would
take his theories seriously. One crime like Nechaiev’s carried
out in Europe in the name of the International would suffice
to deal the workers’ cause a reeling blow. The struggle against
Bakunin had become a matter of life and death for the
International.
The struggle had to be fought under very unfavourable
circumstances. The French sections had been swept away by
354 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
the White terror after the Commune. Those who had been
able to flee were refugees in Switzerland, England or France.
An immense amount of work devolved on the refugee com-
mitte^of the General Council, and Marx, on whom the main
burden fell, was occupied for months raising money for them,
securing them work, giving them advice. He made the per-
sonal acquaintance of practically every refugee, and a number
of them becafne his, friends. The most important of the refugee
Communards were admitted to the General Council, including
Vaillant, Ranvier and other Blanquists. These were Socialists
who, in whatever else they differed from Marx, agreed with
him on the most important point of all, i.e. the necessity of the
International taking its place in the political struggle. Among
the multitude of refugees there were, as Engels wrote to Lieb-
knecht, £ of course the usual proportion of scum, with Vcr-
mersch, editor of Pere Duchene (a paper published during the
Commune) as the worst of the lot.’ The Jacobins formed
a ‘Section Frangaise de 1871’ and relapsed into their
favourite role of theatrical and bloodthirsty revolutionism.
The General Council were far too spineless for them, and
they soon started attacking it vigorously in Qui Vive , a paper
edited by Vermersch.
In their eyes the General Council was Marx. Marx, they
maintained, was living in luxury at the expense of the workers.
He embezzled the workers’ money, and had made the Inter-
national a ‘German aristocratic’ domain. He was a Pan-
German and a crafty servant of his master, Bismarck. All this
had been said t before, but by the reactionary Press. But now
it was repeated and decked out with fondly invented details
by the ultra-revolutionaries, the enemies of ‘authority.’ Their
particular complaint was that the International was in German
control and they played as usual on all the chauvinistic
instincts, old and new. There was not a semblance of justi-
fication for their complaint. There were three times as
many English as Germans on the General Council, and the
Germans were outnumbered even by the French. The num-
ber of members represented by the French was certainly
not very large, and the Blanquists could certainly not be
reproached with harbouring affection for the new German
Empire.
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 355
The French exaltes cost the General Council a great deal of
time and a great deal of trouble, and at the same time it was
compelled to occupy itself with a number of disagreeable
internal disputes. Marx had secured the election of his old
friend Eccarius as general secretary. The IrAernatiorf&l was
poor, and all it could pay its general secretary was fift
shillings a week, and even this he did not receive regularly.
So he added to his income by journalistic work, reporting
International affairs for The Times and" other newspapers.
Occasionally he mentioned things that were not intended for
publication, and this repeatedly led to heated arguments at
General Council meetings, and sometimes Marx had difficulty
in protecting Eccarius from the general indignation. Then
came the London conference. It was decided that its sessions
should be private and that no communications should Be made
to the Press, including the Party Press, and everyone but
Eccarius abided by this decision. A storm of indignation arose,
and Eccarius was violently attacked. This time even Marx
could not help him, and ever afterwards Eccarius felt that Marx
had let him down. He had long been closely associated with
the English trade union leaders, and as soon as they started
opposing Marx he sided with them and did a great deal to
intensify personal animosities on the General Council. Occa-
sionally its meetings were very lively indeed. ‘The meetings
in High Holborn, where the General Council met at that time , 5
Lessner writes in his memoirs, ‘were the most tempestuous and
exhausting that can be imagined. It was no light task to stand
up to the babel of tongues and the profound differences of
temperament and of ideas. Those who criticised Marx for his
intolerance ought to have seen the skill with which he got to
the heart of people’s ideas and demonstrated the fallacies of
their deductions and conclusions . 5 The refugee Communards
brought more than enough temperament with them. Of the
English members of the General Council Odger and Lucraft
had resigned, having taken advantage of the International’s
pro-Communard manifesto to dissociate themselves from an
organisation in which they, as cautious and far-sighted indi-
viduals and members of Royal Commissions and friends of
some of the very best people, had long since begun to experience
a sensation of discomfort. (Odger had a magnificent career,
356 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
and ended by being knighted and being awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize.) Those Englishmen who remained on the General
Council coquetted with the Liberals, split on purely personal
grounds into two and sometimes into three factions and did
nothing to lessdn the general friction. Engels definitely settled
ir,London in the middle of September and Marx proposed his
election to the General Council, but even his admission to that
body, valuable as it was, only had negative consequences. To
the Londoners Marx was an old friend. They knew him, his
wife and his children, and they knew how unspeakably hard
his life had been during all these years, and even those who did
not like him respected him for his selfless work for the common
cause. But Engels was a rich manufacturer from Manchester,
a distinguished-looking gentleman, with excellent manners,
and somewhat cool and distant. Certainly he was very clever
and educated and a good Socialist, and many years ago he had
written a book; that they either knew or heard for the first time
now; but in their eyes he was first of all a stranger. And he
was not always a very nice stranger cither. In later years
Engels himself told Bernstein that Marx generally played
the role of peace-maker and conciliator, but when he, Engels,
was in the chair the General Council meetings generally
ended with a colossal row. In the editorial chair of the JVeue
Rheinische fitting it had been the same. The downfall of
the International is not attributable to the friction on the
General Council, but efficiency was certainly not promoted
by it.
Just at this moment of internal tension it was called upon to
withstand a serious test. The vigorous attack on the General
Council contained in the circular issued by the Bakuninist
Congress at Sonvilliers attracted a great deal of attention. It
was printed and reprinted and long extracts appeared in the
bourgeois Press. (‘The International monster is devouring
itself. 5 ) In France, where everything in any way connected
with the International was wildly persecuted, it was posted up
on the houses. The General Council replied with another
circular, ‘The Alleged Split in the International , 5 revealing the
secret history of the Bakunin Alliance for the first time. This
made the Bakuninists very angry indeed. They said a General
Congress must be summoned at once. Certainly, the General
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 357
Council replied, things could not continue like this. Invita-
tions were sent out on July 10, 1872, for a Congress to take
place on September 2 at the Hague. Marx wrote to Sorge that
the life or death of the International was at stake.
The Bakuninist sections in the Latin coifhtries promptly
protested at the choice of the Hague. The Federation Ju^s-
sienne wrote that the Congress ought not to meet in a milieu
germanique and suggested Switzerland instead. Ffom their own
point of view they were quite right. Tfie sections 5 limited
funds meant that to a certain extent the composition of the
Congress depended on where it took place, for the cost of
travelling necessarily limited the number of delegates who
could travel from a great distance. It was therefore intelligible
that the Swiss were in favour of Switzerland. They expected
their argument that Bakunin would not be able to travel to
Holland either through France or through Germany, because
in both countries he would be liable to arrest, to carry parti-
cular weight. But Marx was in a similar position. The same
reasons would make it impossible for him, as well as other
members of the General Council, to travel to Switzerland. But
antagonism had by this time become far too profound for
material considerations to carry any weight. The Bakuninists
considered the advisability of being represented at the Congress
at all. On August 4 the Italians at Rimini decided not to be
represented at the Hague, and proposed the summoning of an
opposition Congress at Neuchatel, also on September 2. The
Swiss Bakuninists did not go so far as that. They decided,
with Bakunin’s consent, to be represented at the Hague. Even
the moderate spirits among them could no longer conceal from
themselves the fact that a split was inevitable. In the last resort
the differences between Marx and Bakunin boiled down to the
differences between the historical tasks necessarily confronting
the proletariat in countries in which capitalism was fully
developed and the illusions to which the semi- and demi-
semi-proletarians living in countries in which capitalist
development was only just beginning were equally necessarily
subject. Even the most intelligent of the Bakuninists formed
a most distorted picture of the situation. Malon, for instance,
had for a long time resisted the tendencies making for a split.
Now he reconciled himself to it. ‘Now that I am calm and
358 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
alone, I see that the split was inevitable, 5 he wrote to a friend
at the end of August. In his opinion it was inevitable because
of the temperamental differences between the Latin and the
German races. One day this, like everything else that divided
the naVions, wo^ld disappear ‘into the infinite of the human
TfeToe. 5 But now these differences still existed, and the recent
war had only intensified them. It would be in vain to go on
trying to unive the incompatible. Everyone who attended it
knew that the Hague Congress would be the last of the united
International.
When it met at the Hague on September 2, the town was
swarming with journalists and secret agents. No assembly of
the International had roused the world's attention like this
one. It was the first after the Commune — a ‘declaration of
war of chaos on order. 5 An attempt had been made to persuade
the Dutch Government to forbid the Congress. Jules Simon
had travelled from Paris to the Hague to present his Govern-
ment's request to this effect, but he had as little success as
others who wanted the same. Next it had been announced
that the Congress would resolve on acts of terrorism, and that
it was a rendezvous of regicides. But the Dutch Government
refused to be intimidated. Next an attempt had been made to
incite the population against the Congress. The Haager
Dagblaad , for instance, warned the citizens of the Hague not
to allow their wives and daughters to go out alone during the
sessions of the Congress, and called on all the jewellers to draw
their shutters. The police, however, took no action and seemed
actually to regard the Congress with benevolence. A Berlin
secret police agent reluctantly reported that up to September 5
all the meetings were strictly private, and ‘not only does the
Dutch police keep no watch whatever on them but protects
the meeting-place in the Lombardstrasse so scrupulously that
the public is not even allowed a look into the ground-floor
where the meetings are held, or even so much as make an
attempt to overhear through the open window a single word
of what is taking place within, 5 As long as the sessions remained
secret there was nothing for the journalists to do but wander
round the meeting hall and describe their ‘impressions. 5 A
few ‘faked 5 interviews with Marx. Others described the dele-
gates, and Marx in particular. The correspondent of the
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 359
Independence Beige wrote that the impression that Marx made
on him was that of a c gentleman farmer , 5 which was friendly
at any rate.
The Congress was not very numerously attended. No more
than sixty-five delegates were present. Congresses of the
International had been better attended in the past, and am
the delegates were many who were not known from before.
But it was the first International Congress attended by Marx
and Engels. The first and private sessions were devoted to
examination of the delegates 5 mandates, and there was bitter
strife about each one, for each one was important. At previous
Congresses this part of the proceedings had been regarded as
but a superfluous formality. It soon became clear that there
was a majority for Marx, with forty votes to twenty-five.
There were two opposing factions, each united as far as
internal questions affecting the International were concerned,
but far from united politically. The opposition was held
together by antagonism to Marx. It consisted of all the
Belgian, all the Dutch, all the Jurassian and nearly all the
English and Spanish delegates. The majority was more
united, consisting of the Germans, the German-Swiss, the
Hungarians, the Bohemians, the German tmigris from America,
but included many French emigres and delegates of illegal
sections in France. The Blanquists were particularly well
represented among the French Emigres.
This grouping by no means bore out the theory of the con-
trast between the state-worshipping Germanic races who were
loyal to Marx and the freedom-loving, anti-authoritarian
Latins. Guillaume, leader of the Jurassian section, was
extremely astonished when Eccarius told him c que le torchon
brulait au Conseil General , 5 He had believed that the English
delegates, who were £rade unionists, were devoted followers of
Marx. He now found out that they were Vw guerre ouverte avec
ceux qui formaient la majorite . 5 He was just as surprised when he
found there was Dutch opposition to the General Council.
Attempts to unite the opposition were made before the
opening of the Congress, but it was only towards its
close that the fundamental political differences between
the various groups made it possible to come to a common
understanding.
360 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
Violent disputes took place during the examination of the
mandates. The English delegates were unwilling to admit
their fellow-countryman, Maltman Barry, who was provided
with a mandate from an American section, on the ground that
he wa^not a krtown trade union leader. At that Marx sprang
indignantly to his feet. It was an honour to Citizen Barry that
that was so, he exclaimed, because almost all the English trade
union leaden* were sold to Gladstone or some other bourgeois
politician. That remark was held against Marx for a long
time. The mandates of the delegates of the German sections
were also disputed. During their trial for high treason at
Leipzig in 1872 Bebel and Liebknecht had declared the
solidarity of their party with the International, though the
party did not belong to the International and its local groups
were riot sections of the International. This was formally
correct. To prevent their party from being banned Bebel and
Liebknecht could not have done otherwise. The Bakuninists,
relying on this statement, demanded that the German dele-
gates’ mandate should not be recognised. Now the sections
the German delegates represented were not very big and had
only been formed specially for the Congress, but behind many
a Bakuninist mandate there was not exactly a mass organisation
either. The German mandate was accepted.
Fully three days were occupied with these and similar
matters. The real Congress did not begin until September 5.
It met in a working-class quarter of the town. A French
newspaper remarked sarcastically that next to the Congress
hall was a prison, ‘then laundries, small workshops, many
pothouses, tap-rooms, here called taperij , and clandestine
establishments such as are used, as one would say in Congress
style, by the Dutch proletariat.’ The sessions took place in
the evening, in order to enable workers to attend. ‘The
workers certainly did not fail to put in an appearance. Never
have I seen a crowd so packed, so serious, so anxious to see
and hear.’ The events of the evening of September 5 were
described by Le Frangais as follows: ‘At last we have had a real
session of the International Congress, with a crowd ten times
greater than the hall could accommodate, with applause and
interruptions and pushing and jostling and tumultuous cries,
and personal attacks and extremely radical but nevertheless
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 361
extremely conflicting declarations of opinion, with recrimina-
tions, denunciations, protests, calls to order, and finally a
closure of the session, if not of the discussion, which at past
ten o’clock, in a tropical heat and amid inexpressible confusion,
imposed itself by the force of things.’
The first question discussed was that of the extension of the
General Council’s powers in accordance with the resolution
passed at the London conference. The opposit : on not only
wanted no extension of the General Council’s powers, but
objected to the powers the General Council already possessed.
They wanted to reduce it to a statistical office, or even better,
to a mere letter-box, a correspondence office. These advocates
of autonomy were opposed by Sorge, who had come from
New York. He said that the International not only needed a
head, but one with plenty of brains. Guillaume, who describes
the scene, says that at this people looked at Marx and laughed.
The Congress gave the General Council its extended powers.
The resolution stated that it was the duty of the General
Council to carry out the decisions of the International Congress
and to see that the principles and general intentions of the
statutes were observed in every country, and that it had
the power to suspend branches, sections, committees and
federations until the next Congress. Thirty-six delegates
voted for this resolution, with fifteen against and six ab-
stentions.
When the ballot was over Engels rose and proposed in his
own and Marx’s name that the headquarters of the General
Council be transferred from London to New York. This
caused an indescribable sensation. _A few weeks previously,
when somebody had suggested removing the headquarters of
fche^ Internationa l fr om London. Marx had opposed it strenu-
ously, arid now here he was proposing it himself . Vaillant,
speaking for the iilanquists, made a passionate protest. So far
as he was concerned, transferring the General Council to New
York was equivalent to transferring it to the moon. The Blan-
quists could not possibly have any influence on the General
Council unless it remained where it was, i.e. in his place of
exile, London. But Marx had calculated rightly. If the
Blanquists, who otherwise supported him, opposed him
in this, there were plenty of opposition delegates to support
362 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
him. A General Council in America would obviously mean
a General Council without Marx. And so they voted for
the resolution. It was carried by twenty-six votes to twenty-
three.
Th£ii the political debate began. The General Council
‘'proposed that the following resolution of the London con-
ference be incorporated in the statutes. ‘In its struggle against
the collective power of the possessing classes, the proletariat
can only act as a class if it constitutes its own distinct political
party, opposed to all the old parties formed by the possessing
classes. The forming of a political party by the proletariat is
indispensable in order to assure the triumph of the social
revolution and its ultimate object, the abolition of all classes.
The coalition of working-class forces, already obtained in
economic struggles, must also serve as a lever in the hands of
that class in its struggle against the political power of its
exploiters. The lords of the earth and the lords of capital
always use their political privileges to defend and perpetuate
their economic monopolies and to enslave Labour, and there-
fore the conquest of political power is the great duty of the
proletariat . 5 Every point of view was represented in the dis-
cussion, from that of the extremists opposed to political inter-
vention of any kind on the one hand to that of the Blanquists,
who had no patience with the economic struggle, on the other.
The Blanquists accepted the principle of the strike as a means
of political action, but their real interest remained the barri-
cade. They wanted to put s the militant organisation of the
revolutionary < forces of the proletariat and the proletarian
struggle 5 on the programme of the next Congress. Guillaume,
as spokesman of the ‘anti-authoritarians , 5 stated that the
majority wanted the seizure of political power and the minority
wanted its annihilation. The General Council resolution was
carried by twenty-nine votes to five, with eight abstentions.
By this time many delegates had left, being unable to remain
at the Hague any longer, and others no longer took part in
the voting, having lost interest. The Blanquists attacked the
General Council for having caused the revolution to take flight
across the ocean and left the Congress. The Bakuninists,
however, decided after reflection that the situation was far
better than it had seemed at first. ‘The authority of the
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 363
General Council, voted for in principle by the majority, is in
fact abolished by the choice of New York/ Guillaume wrote
in triumph.
On the last day the Congress discussed the desirability of
expelling members of the Bakuninist Alliance from the inter-
national. A special committee was appointed to examine tlje
evidence submitted to it by the General Council. Guillaume
was invited to appear before it but refused, giving the same
explanation as he had given at the Congress* in Latin Switzer-
land in April, 1870. ‘Every member of the International has
the full and complete right to join any secret society, even the
Freemasons. Any inquiry into a secret society would simply
be equivalent to a denunciation to the police, 5 he maintained.
The utmost to which he would consent was to a ‘private con-
versation 5 with members of the committee. Clever as he was,
he could not answer the weighty evidence against him.
Nechaiev’s letter to Liubavin made a great impression.
Bakunin and Guillaume were expelled from the Inter-
national.
The Congress ended on September 7. On September 8 a
meeting, organised by the local section, took place at Amster-
dam. Among the speakers were Marx, Engels, Lafargue,
Sorge, Becker and others. Marx’s speech was reported in
La Liberte , the Brussels organ of the International, and in the
Allgemeen Handelsblad of Amsterdam, and was by far the most
important made by him at the time of the Congress. In it he
summed up its results. ‘He proclaimed the necessity of the
working classes fighting the old, decaying society in the
political field and in the social field alike. The worker must
one day seize political supremacy in order to establish the new
organisation of labour. He must overthrow the old politics
sustaining the old institutions. 5 The International had pro-
claimed the necessity of the political struggle and repudiated
pseudo-revolutionary abstention from politics. But he indi-
cated the future path in general outline only. No prescrip-
tion for the seizure of political power was valid for all countries
and all times, as the Blanquists, and others too, pretended.
‘But we have never said that the means to arrive at these ends
were identical. We know the allowance that must be made for
the institutions, manners and traditions of different countries.
364 KARL MARX.’ MAN AND FIGHTER
We do not deny that there exist countries like America, Eng-
land, and, if I knew your institutions better, I would add
Holland, where the workers may be able to attain their ends
by peaceful means. If that is true we must also recognise that
in nKiSt of thw countries of the Continent force must be the
Igver to which it will be necessary to resort for a time in order
to attain the dominion of labour/
Marx ended his speech with a defence of the decision to
transfer the General Council to America. America was the
land of the workers, to which hundreds of thousands emigrated
every year, whether banished or driven by want, and in
America a new and fruitful field was opening for the Inter-
national. As far as he himself was concerned, he was retiring
from the General Council, but he denied the rumours that he
was retiring from the International. On the contrary, freed
from the burden of administrative work, he would devote him-
self with redoubled energy to the task to which he had devoted
twenty-five years of his life and would continue with until
his last breath, namely his work for the liberation of the
proletariat.
Marx’s motives for transferring the General Council to New
York have been much discussed. At the Congress he had done
all in his power to gain the victory, and he had gained it,
though in some things his victory was more apparent than real.
He had conducted a ruthless struggle against the Bakuninists
and seemed determined to conduct it to the very end, i.e. the
complete extermination of anarchism. And then all of a
sudden he caused the General Council to be banished from
Europe. He 'must obviously have realised that his influence
on the life of the International would be very seriously im-
paired. It has been suggested that Marx had grown weary of
the strain and the petty cares that his work on the General
Council involved, of the ever-increasing burden of correspon-
dence that he had to conduct, the exhausting and fruitless
debates with the English members, the meetings and con-
ferences and visits, and the whole troublesome, time-robbing
labour that devolved mainly upon his shoulders. It has been
suggested that he wished to be free of all this and to return to
his most important task, the completion of Das Kapital .
Certainly Marx often complained of how little time his work
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 365
on the General Council left him for his scientific work. But he
always laid everything else aside when the International
demanded it. ‘He was first of all a revolutionary. 5 One re-
calls those words of Engels. Besides, after the Hague Congress,
Marx could have done much more scientific? work * nthout
sacrificing any of his political work whatever, for Engels now
lived in London and could have represented him on the
General Council and carried out his wishes. But in spite of
this he insisted on the General Council moving away from
London.
Marx had other reasons. For the General Council to have
remained in London would have spelled the ruin of the Inter-
national. Bakunin had been expelled, but the spirit of Bakunin
lived on. Nearly all the sections in Southern Europe, in Italy
and Spain, were ‘anti-authoritarian. 5 The Commune inspired
and inflamed them, and their watchword was action, action all
the time. They wanted all or nothing, and their only battle-
cry was the social revolution. Marx and Engels saw the
danger. ‘Spain is so backward industrially that there can be
no talk of an immediate, complete emancipation of the working
class. Spain must pass through various stages of develop-
ment before it comes to that, and a whole series of obstacles
must be cleared out of the way. 5 The Bakuninists violently
attacked the young Spanish republic, which was threatened on
all sides as it was. Marx and Engels regarded the blind,
impetuous radicalism of the Bakuninists as fatal. ‘The republic
offered the opportunity of compressing those preliminary
stages into the shortest possible time, and of rapidly removing
those obstacles. 5 But the Bakuninists did not listen and did
not look. Anything but attack and again attack and barri-
cades was ‘politics,’ ‘idolising the state,’ cowardly and counter-
revolutionary. It was necessary for the International to part
from them. ‘If we had been conciliatory at the Hague, 5 Engels
wrote to Bebel at the end of June, 1873, ‘if we had hushed up
the split, what would the consequences have been? The
sectarians, namely the Bakuninists, would have had a whole
year’s time to commit far greater stupidities and infamies in
the International’s name. 5
The Hague Congress had also shown that all the Proudhonist
groups, the Dutch, the Belgians and others as well, would have
3bb KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
been ready to follow the Bakuninists as soon as they left or
were expelled from the International, and all that would have
remained would have been the group that supported Marx
during the Congress. It would very soon have melted away.
The (German Party was bound to avoid anything that might
imperil its legal status, particularly after the outcome of the
Leipzig high treason trial. Marx approved of their policy in
this. It would be impossible for them to share in the life of the
International, at least for a long time to come. Of Marx’s
majority at the Congress that only left the Blanquists.
Marx esteemed Blanqui very highly and had a high opinion
of the Blanquists’ courage, and he had not a few personal
friends among them. But a whole world divided him from
them politically. He had had several serious disputes with
them £Ven before the Congress. At the Congress they had
followed him as long as it was a question of fighting against
the ‘anti-politicians,’ the ‘destroyers of the state.’ The Blan-
quists stoutly asserted the omnipotence of the state. It must
not be destroyed but seized, but there was only one way of
seizing it, and that was the barricade — whether in Spain or
France, England or Germany made no difference. In their
eyes the single duty of the International was to organise armed
risings.
We shall return to Marx’s Amsterdam speech in another
connection. It alone gives the explanation of the decision to
transfer the General Council to New York. Had it remained
in London, Marx would only have been able to maintain his
ground with the aid of the Blanquists. The International
would have become Blanquist, and its programme would have
shrunk to the single word: barricade.
The Congress had decided to transfer the General Council
to New York for the year 1872-3. Marx was convinced that
developments in Europe would be so rapid and so favourable
that after a year the General Council would be able to return
from exile. This was a mistake. Marx correctly estimated the
direction the workers’ movement was taking; as happened
more than once, he was mistaken about its tempo . He soon
recognised his error . A year after the Hague Congress he gave
up the International for lost. Its history in America is that
of its gradual death. Its slow decline was occasionally
THE DOWNFALL OF THE INTERNATIONAL 367
interrupted by petty crises, by splits and splits again, and it is
impossible to establish for certain even the date when it finally
expired. When Engels rose at the Hague Congress and pro-
posed that the General Council be transferred to America, the
International ceased to exist.
CHAPTER XXI
THE LAST TEN YEARS
IvIarx was so identified with the International in the public
eye that people refused to believe that the chief of the general
staff would remain in London after the general staff had been
transferred to New York. English newspapers announced that
Marx was preparing to emigrate to America. In 1876 Pro-
fessor Funck Brentano actually told the Le Play Society in
Paris that Marx had been living in the United States ever
since the Hague Congress.
Marx, however, remained in London, still occupied with
work for the International, though to a smaller extent than
before. His first task was to supervise the publication of the
decisions of the Hague Congress. His friend Sorge kept plying
him from New York with requests for instructions. The
furious attacks of the Bakuninists, who now shrank at nothing,
had at least occasionally to be answered with a few sharp
blows. A split occurred in the British Regional Council and
Marx had passages of arms with Hales, Mottershead, Jung and
Eccarius.
From the spring of 1873 onwards it became clearer every
month that what had at first appeared to be only the liquida-
tion of a phase in the life of the International culminating in
the Hague Congress was in fact the liquidation of the Inter-
national itself. In September Marx advised Sorge to ‘let the
formal organisation of the International recede into the back-
ground for the time being, but not to let the headquarters at
New York out of his hands, in order to prevent idiots or
adventurers from gaining control and compromising the cause.*
Events and the inevitable evolution of things would lead
to the resurrection of the International in an improved form; for
the time being it was sufficient not to let the connections with
the best men in the various countries lapse. Marx summed up
the situation in a letter to Sorge in April, 1874. He said there
could be no question at the moment of the working classes
playing a decisive role in Europe. In England the International
*68
THE LAST TEN YEARS 369
was for the time being (once more Tor the time being 5 )
as good as dead, the new French trade unions were but points
of departure from which development would take place when
freer movement became possible again, and in Spain, Italy
and Belgium the proletariat was to all inter ts and r jrposes
impotent. Germany, practically the only country in which
the workers’ movement was in the ascendant, did not count
in the International. Contrary to his hopes, for* practically a
year after the Hague Congress Marx had* no time to resume
his theoretical work but had to devote himself almost entirely
to International affairs; and what time was left to him he had
to devote to the settling of matters he believed to have been
settled already.
Das Kapital was to have been translated into French at the
end of 1867. Elie Reclus, brother of Elisee Reclus, an anarchist
who subsequently became a well-known geographer, undertook
the task, but soon abandoned it. Two years later another
Frenchman undertook it but did not get very far. Not till the
winter of 1871 was a French publisher found who was willing
to take the risk (for a risk it was at that time). There were
difficulties of all kinds from the first. The publisher, a book-
seller named Lachatre, lived abroad, having been condemned
to twenty years’ imprisonment for his part in the Commune,
and his business was managed by a legal administrator. Next
there was a shortage of funds. Marx invited his cousin, August
Philips, who lived in Amsterdam, to share in the cost of
publication, but Philips said he would not think of furthering
Marx’s revolutionary aims. In the end Das Kapital was
published in French, though it only came out in instalments
published at intervals. Marx wrote to Lachatre that this
method of publication gave him particular satisfaction. ‘Sous
cette forme Uouvrage sera plus accessible a la classe ouvriire et pour moi
cette consideration Vemporte sur toute autre ’ 1 Roy, the translator,
did his work well, but Marx had ‘the deuce of an amount’ to
do all the same; not only had he to revise the translation, which
was no light task in view of the condensed style of the original
and the play made with Hegelian phraseology in the chapter
on the theory of value, but he simplified passages here and
1 The work will be more accessible to the working classes in this form, and for
me that consideration takes precedence of all others.
24
370 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
expanded passages there, amplifying the statistical data and
indulging in controversies with French economists. The final
instalment did not appear till May, 1875, for there were periods
when he hLd to stop work on it altogether and others when he
could <*nly continue by exerting himself to the utmost, for he
wa§ a sick man.
In autumn, 1873, he broke down altogether. He had been
suffering from headaches and insomnia during the summer
and was ordered by his doctor not to work more than four
hours a day. Then his health improved somewhat, but in
November it grew worse again. The ‘chronic mental depres-
sion’ grew worse and worse. The doctor ordered complete
cessation of work, and his friends feared the worst. Once more
he recovered, but in the summer of 1874 he again had to take
a ‘complete rest.’ After years of superhuman toil on Das
Kapitaly c arried out under the most adverse circumstances in
tfie hunger and poverty of exile, harassed by cares about
to- morro w’s bread to feed his wife and children, followed by
the work of building up tli£ ^International and the exhausting
struggle to hold it togethe r in to which .he cast the last oun ce o f
his r e sources, his old liv er trouble broke out : again. He never
again shook it off completely, though three visits to Carlsbad
and a cure at the German resort of Neuenahr caused such an
improvement that it never became threatening again. His
first visit to Carlsbad in the summer of 1874 was somewhat
risky, as it was by no means certain that the German and
Austrian police would allow the ‘chief of the Red International’
to go unmolested. In August, 1 874, Marx applied to the Home
Office for British citizenship, but the application for naturalisa-
tion was refused on the grounds (which of course Marx never
knew) that ‘this man was not loyal to his king.’ In Carlsbad,
as the police boasted, he was ‘continually and uninterruptedly
watched,’ but gave ‘cause for no suspicion,’ so they did not
trouble him any more. After the enactment of the Socialist
law of 1878 the route through Germany was closed to him, but
he no longer needed the German and Bohemian watering
places. The headaches and insomnia, the ‘nervous exhaustion’
as Engels called it, remained.
After 1873 Marx never regained his old capacity for work.
He remained the insatiable reader that he had always been; he
THE LAST TEN YEARS 37I
continued indefatigably making extracts from what he read,
he went on collecting material, but he no longer had the
capacity to organise it. Again and again he sat down and
started and in the autumn of 1878 believed that sflie second
volume of Das Kapital would be finished withii* a year, ^but he
never completed more than a few pages of the fair copy. Marx
had learned Russian. England had served as the main illus-
tration of theoretical development in the first volume of Das
Kapital , and he intended to use Russia as the basis of his treat-
ment of ground rent in the second volume. Marx could not
get enough Russian literature. After his death Engels found
two whole cubic metres of Russian statistical material. It was
not conscientiousness alone that drove Marx on in his ever-
lasting search for new material. He used it also to hide from
himself the crippling of his creative powers. Engrfs hated
those piles of Russian books and once said to Lafargue that he
would have liked to burn them. For he suspected Marx of
sheltering behind them in order to find peace from the pricks
of his own conscience and the urging of his friends. But Engels
did not discover how little had been completed of what he had
believed to have been completed, in spite of all his suspicions,
until after Marx’s death, when he examined his manuscripts.
‘If I had known,’ he wrote to Bebel in the late summer of 1883,
‘I would have given him no peace by day or night until the
whole thing had been finished and printed. Marx himself
knew this better than anyone, and he also knew that if it came
to the worst, as it has, the manuscript could be edited by me
in his spirit. He actually said so to Tussy.’ The second
volume of Das Kapital was completed by Engels^and published
in 1885. The third volume appeared in 1894. After 1877,
when he wrote a contribution to Engels’s attack on Eugen
Diihring, as well as a few articles opposing Gladstone’s Russian
policy, Marx published practically nothing.
The latter appeared in Conservative newspapers. There
was no Socialist Press in England, but when it came to attack-
ing Russia Marx was willing to enter into alliance with the
devil himself. The Franco-Prussian War had enormously
strengthened Russia’s position in Europe, and Russia remained
the ‘so far unassailed bulwark and reserve army of the counter-
revolution.’ Russia was still an oppressive nightmare over
KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
372
Europe. Anyone who fought Russia was objectively fighting
in the service of the revolution.
The International was broken. In the middle of the seven-
ties there Was no proletarian army anywhere but in Germany.
Unde* 1 Marx’s ^leadership it did all in its power to denounce
Bismarck’s servility towards the Tsar, in the Reichstag, in its
newspapers, in pamphlets, like Liebknecht’s The Oriental
Question , or riiall Europe become Cossack? which Marx approved
of, although he usually did not see eye to eye with Liebknecht.
But the German Party was far too weak to affect German
foreign policy in the slightest degree. The European prole-
tariat, split, scattered or not organised at all, was powerless.
Marx was convinced that the future belonged to it, and what-
ever happened in Europe nothing could shake his convic-
tion of its ultimate victory. ‘So far I have always found, 5 he
once wrote to Johann Philipp Becker, ‘that all really sound
men who have once taken the revolutionary road invariably
draw new strength from defeat and become ever more resolute
the longer they swim in the stream of events. 5 The bourgeois
world was destined to destruction, though how and when was
uncertain, for it depended on factors over which the proletariat
so far had no control. ‘General conditions in Europe are of
such a kind that they are heading more and more towards a
European war. We must go through it before there can be
any thought of the European working classes having decisive
influence. 5 That was what Marx thought in the spring of
1874. War might advance the rise of the proletariat to power
or might impede it. Marx closely followed the foreign politics
of the great European countries. In February, 1878, when his
wife was ill and he was suffering from headaches by day,
insomnia by night, and bad fits of coughing, he wrote two long
letters to Liebknecht which show how carefully he followed
political and military events during the Russo-Turkish war,
which ended with the preliminary peace of Adrianople at the
end of January.
In 1874 Marx still expected a resurrection of the European
workers 5 movement as a result of a general European war.
For as long as the stronghold of the counter-revolution had not
fallen, as long as its shadow still lay over Europe, all hope of a
victory for the revolution was in vain. The movement might
THE LAST TEN YEARS 373
gain success in one or other or all the countries of Central and
Western Europe, but the last word would still be spoken by
the Tsar. And the Tsar could only be overthrown in a war
with another Great Power. The foundations on w/iich Russian
absolutism rested were still too strong to be shaken by/inything
less than a European war. Up to the middle of the seventies
Marx was extremely sceptical of all news of revolutionary
movements in Russia, and the Nechaiev affair *was not calcu-
lated to make him change his mind.
But the more thoroughly he studied Russia, the more
Russian literature he read, the more Russian statistics he
examined, the more probable it began to appear to him that
this colossus with feet of clay only needed a slight blow from
without to cause it to collapse. When Russia declared war on
Turkey in 1877 he felt practi cally certain of a Turkish victor y,
which would be followed by a Russian revolution. And when
the Turks really did gain a victory he believed revolution in
St. Petersburg to be at hand. ‘All classes of Russian society
are economically, morally, intellectually in complete decay,’
he wrote to Sorge at the end of September, 1877. ‘This time
the revolution will begin in the East. 5 On February 4, 1878,
he explained to Liebknecht that ‘we are definitely on the side
of the Turks for two reasons: (1) Because we have studied the
Turkish peasant, i.e. the Turkish masses, and we have learnt
that the Turkish peasant is without doubt one of the most
capable and moral representatives of European peasantry
(this argument could of course also have been used of the
Serbian and Bulgarian peasants whom the Turks oppressed);
(2) because the defeat of the Russians will considerably hasten
the social revolution in Russia, the elements of which already
to a great extent exist, and thereby also hasten the revolution
in all Europe. 5 When M arx w rote t his Tur key had already
bee n defeated. But~Marx did not abandon his idea of the
necessity of a European war.
There was now a revolutionary movement in Russia that
was incomparably stronger than could have been hoped for
two years previously. The Narodnaya Volya (‘People’s Will 5 )
Party attacked absolutism with the only weapon the revolu-
tionaries had. That weapon was Terrorism. In 1879 and
1880 members of this Party made several abortive attempts on
374 KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
the life of the Tsar. Many paid for them with their lives.
Those who managed to escape abroad (Leo Hartman, N.
Morosov, and others) were received by Marx as friends.
Alexander N was assassinated by a member of the Narodnaya
Volya P?xty in March, 1881. On April u Marx wrote to his
daughter Jenny that the Terror was ‘a historically inevitable
means of action, the morality or immorality of which it was as
useless to discwss as that of the earthquake at Chios. 5 The
•Russian Terrorists were ‘excellent people through and through,
sans phrase melodramatique , simple, straightforward, heroic. 5 It
was no longer necessary for the fortress to be stormed from
without, for it was crumbling by itself. War had become
superfluous. Nay more, it would actually be harmful now.
Engels wrote to Bebel in the middle of December, 1879: ‘In
a few motfths things in Russia are bound to come to a head.
Either absolutism will be overthrown, after which, the strong-
hold of reaction having collapsed, a wind of a different kind
will blow through Europe, or there will be a European war
which will bury the present German Party in the struggle
which every country will have to fight for its national existence. 5
On September 12, 1880, Marx wrote to Danielson that he
hoped that there would be no general European war. ‘Al-
though in the long run it could not hold up social development,
and in that I include economic development, but would rather
intensify it, it would undoubtedly involve a futile exhaustion
of forces for a longer or shorter period. 5 Three months before
Marx’s death Engels wrote to Bebel, repeating Marx’s views
as follows: ‘I would consider a European war a misfortune;
this time a terrible misfortune. It would inflame chauvinism
everywhere for years, as every country would have to fight for
its existence. The whole work of the revolutionaries in Russia,
who stand on the eve of victory, would be annihilated and
made in vain, our party in Germany would be temporarily
swamped and broken up in the chauvinist flood, and the same
thing would happen in France. 5
Russia was ‘sinking into a morass. 5 Tsarism was succumbing
in peaceful putrefaction and its last supports were being
smashed by the revolutionaries’ bombs. Marx over-estimated
the disintegration of Russian society and the strength of the
revolutionary movement. The power of absolutism, though
THE LAST TEN YEARS 375
weakened, was not shaken nearly to the extent that Marx
believed. It had become improbable that Russia would
actively intervene as in 1 849 and give military aid in suppress-
ing a Central European revolution. The weight ^/ith whicji
Russia had overlain Europe for decades hadjbecome f lighter.
Europe could go its own way without the fear of finding it
barred at all decisive points by Russian troops — but oniy if
peace were kept, and a struggle of warring peoples did not
come to bar the way and hold up the struggle of the rising
proletarian class and throw it back for ten, twenty years or
even more.
In the seventies and the beginning of the eighties the Euro-
pean workers’ movement took great steps forward and ad-
vanced faster than Marx expected after the death of the Inter-
national; and it did so without passing through a general
European war. True, it did not always take the path that
Marx considered the right one. He found much to criticise
in the German Party, and later in the French. But in spite of
its faltering and its uncertainties and all its temporary devia-
tions it was on the right track.
The 1874 elections showed that the ‘Eisenacher,’ the
followers of Licbknecht and Bebel, and the followers of Lassallc
were practically equal in strength. During the decade that
followed Lassalle’s death the movement he had founded lost a
great deal of its sectarian character. The specific Lassallean
demands still remained on its programme, but they were not
believed in with much conviction and in the end survived
practically only out of sheer tradition. The two German
workers’ parties grew nearer and nearer to each other. They
both fought the same enemy, they were both persecuted alike,
and gradually the wish to surmount the breach and unite
became so strong that towards the end of 1874 amalgamation
into one great German workers’ party was decided on. Marx
and Engels were indignant at the news. When Marx was sent
a draft of the programme of the new party, he wrote his obser-
vations on it and sent them to the ‘Eisenacher.’ He took the
programme point by point, subjecting each to devastating
criticism, proving the whole to be a hash of ill-understood
scientific Socialism, vulgar Democratic phraseology and long-
obsolete Lassallean demands, and he ended by threatening to
376 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
attack it publicly if it were adopted. It was adopted, and
became the programme of the German Social-Democratic
Workers-’ Party, founded at Gotha at the end of May, 1875.
Marx, inVpite of his threat, made no public attack on it,
because the pijogramme was regarded as Communistic by
workers * and bourgeoisie alike. Nor did the split, which
Mai'x regarded as inevitable, occur. The Party remained
united, and* in 1891, at Erfurt, adopted a pure Marxist
programme. *
Marx had made a mistake and recognised it. He never
regarded himself as infallible. Engels, in a letter to Bcbel of
November 4, 1875, described the place that Marx and he
assigned themselves in the international workers’ movement.
Their task, he said, was ‘uninfluenced by details and distracting
local conditions of the struggle, from time to time to measure
what had been said and done by the theoretical principles that
are valid for all modern proletarian movements.’ They de-
manded one thing only from the Party; that it remain true to
itself. Bakuninists and bourgeois politicians accused Marx of
enthroning himself as Red Tsar in London, sending out ukases
for which implicit obedience was required; and they said that
these often led to prison, death and destruction. Nothing could
have been farther from the truth. ‘It is easy for us to criticise,’
Engels acknowledged in a letter to Frau Liebknecht, when
Wilhelm Liebknecht was once again in prison, ‘while in Ger-
many every imprudent or thoughtless word may lead to im-
prisonment and a temporary interruption of family life.’
Another time he wrote to Bebel: ‘It is easy for us to talk, but we
know that you! position is far more difficult than ours.’
After the enactment of Bismarck’s Socialist law in 1878,
when the Party spent some time in hesitating uncertainty and
many thought that the right policy was to be absolutely loyal
and not provoke the enemy, in the hope of causing him to
moderate his severity, Marx attacked them furiously. Though
once more he threatened to attack them publicly, he did not
do so. On November 5, 1881, he wrote to Sorge that the
‘wretched’ attitude of the Sozialdemokrat , the paper the Party
published at Zurich and smuggled into Germany, led to con-
stant disputes with Liebknecht and Bebel in Leipzig, and that
these disputes often became very violent indeed. ‘But we have
THE LAST TEN YEARS
377
avoided intervening publicly in any way,’ the letter continued.
‘It would not be decent for people living abroad in comparative
peace to provide an edifying spectacle for the bourgeoisie and
the Government by aggravating the position of rlen working
in the most difficult conditions and at great personal sacrifice.’
The same trust in the logic of development that had guided
Marx as leader of the General Council of the International
determined his attitude to the growing German? Party now.
In France the Socialist ranks that had been scattered by the
Commune gradually re-formed towards the end of the seven-
ties. A fair number of them were former Bakuninists who
drew nearer and nearer to Marxism. Prominent among them
were Jules Guesde and Benoit Malon. In November, 1877,
Guesde founded UEgalite , a weekly to which Bebel and
Licbknecht contributed from Germany. Although not at all
clear in its views, the circle grouped round Ufigalite neverthe-
less contributed substantially towards the propagation of the
basic ideas of modern Socialism. So rapidly did the movement
grow that in October, 1879, the Federation du Parti des
Travailleurs Socialistes was founded at a Congress at Mar-
seilles. Its programme, adopted at a Congress at Le Havre
in November, 1880, was fundamentally based on Marx. Guesde
visited London and the new party’s minimum programme was
the joint labour of Marx, Engels, Guesde and Lafargue. It
did not correspond with the wishes of Marx and Engels in every
way. Among other things Guesde insisted on inserting a de-
mand for a minimum legal wage. Marx opposed this, saying
that if the French proletariat were still childish enough to need
such a bait it was not worth while drawing up a programme
for them at all. But Guesde insisted and the demand remained
in the programme. But this did not cause Marx to withdraw
his advice and help from the new Party, any more than he had
done in the case of the German Party when it drew up its
Gotha programme. He knew that it would overcome these
infantile ailments. He did not believe the young party to be
united enough to survive for long. This time he was right.
No sooner had it been founded when it split into two. Marx’s
connection with the Parti Ouvrier, led by Guesde, was a very
slender one. Engels wrote to Bernstein in October, 1881, that
Marx had given Guesde advice from time to time through
378 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Lafargue, but it was scarcely ever followed. In the violent
dispute that broke out between the two groups after the split
at the Congress at St. Etienne in September, 1882, Guesde and
his friends were continually attacked for ‘submitting to the
will of a man who lived in London outside any party control. 5
They did not submit to his control and had no justification
whatever for theiy claim that theirs was the scientific Socialism
that Marx had founded. A remark that Marx once made to
Lafargue has often been quoted. *Ce qu’il^y a de certain^ e’est
que moij '* ne suis pa s Marxiste' 1
Nevertheless the movement in France made progress while
the w or king classes in England, the most industrialised country
in the wor ld and the country in which Marx lived* remained
silent and inactive. Occasionally the British working classes
seemed to stir, but no attempt to form a proletarian party ever
got beyond the preliminary stages. In the spring of 1881 Marx
tried to bring the trade union leaders into contact with the
radical politicians. Engels, optimistic as ever, already visual-
ised a ‘Proletarian-Radical Party 5 led by Joseph Cowen, M.P.
for Newcastle, ‘an old Chartist, half, if not a whole Communist
and a very fine fellow. 5 A year later he wrote to Kautsky
‘There is no workers 5 party here, there are only Conservatives
and Liberal-Radicals. 5 Yet Marx’s ideas gradually pene-
trated even in England. The first and by far the most im-
portant English Marxist was H. M. Hyndman. He had read
Das Kapital in French and was converted at once. He attached
himself to Marx, they frequently exchanged visits, and at
Marx’s quiet retreat in Maitland Park Road, they would
often talk till late into the night. But in the summer of 1881
the friendship abruptly terminated. Hyndman wrote a book,
England for All , in which he popularised Das Kapital and did so
very well. But he did not mention Marx’s name, though he
incidentally remarked that he owed a great deal to an im-
portant thinker. Marx took this seriously amiss and refused
to accept the excuse tnat^E nglishfr ien did not like being taught
by foreigners. Hyndman was a vain man, with a strong
inclination to political adventurism, and his silence about Marx
was not due to objective reasons alone. Hyndman’s alleged
sole motive for silence about Marx was paralleled by Guesde,
1 Wh at is qu ite certain is that I am not a Marxist.
THE LAST TEN YEARS
379
who gave the same reason for asking Malon to give out his
programme, which Marx had co-operated in drafting, as his
own. Hyndman said that Engels’s jealousy was to blame for
the breach. Objective and personal reasons may \la.ve been^
combined. To the en d of his life Marx remained practically
un known in England.
The old International was incapable of resurrection. In
February, 1881, Marx wrote to Domela Nieuwenhuis, the
Dutch Socialist, that the right moment for the formation of a
new workers’ association had not yet come. But th*\ right
moment was drawing nearer every year. The old General
Council was dead, and the new was only in the making. There
were no congresses, no resolutions to which the movements in
the various countries could adhere. But Marx was alive. His
significance for the proletarian movement after the dissolution
of the International cannot be better illustrated than by a few
sentences from a letter Engels wrote to Bernstein in October,
1 88 1. ‘By his theoretical and practical work Marx has
acquired such a position that the best people in the workers’
movements in the various countries have full confidence in
him. They turn to him for advice at decisive moments, and
generally find that his advice is the best. He holds that position
in Germany, France and Russia, not to mention the smaller
countries. Marx, and in the second place myself, stand in the
same relation to the other national movements as we do to the
French. We are in constant touch with them, in so far as it is
worth while and opportunity is provided, but any attempt to
influence people against their will would only do harm ana
destroy the old trust that survives from the time of the Inter-
national. In any case, we have too much experience in revo-
lutionary matters to attempt anything of the sort. It is not
Marx who imposes his opinions, much less his will, upon the
people, but it is they who come to him. That is what Marx’s
real influence, which is of such extreme importance for the
movement, depends on.’
Marx issued no orders and set no patterns which the class
war should follow. Just as he believed the idea of commanding
the European workers’ movement from London to be absurd,
so did he abstain from devising a plan of action that should be
valid for all countries and all times. The speech he made at
380 KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Amsterdam after the Hague Congress has already been men-
tioned* It had an unusual fate. When it appeared in the
Volksstait in October, 1872, those passages in which Marx
^poke of force as the lever of the revolution in most Continental
countries Were ^ missing. It had been necessary to omit them
for feai of police persecution. In recent years it has again
been quoted, but once more in abbreviated form, though
needlessly row; and this time the omitted passage is that in
which Marx spoke of the possibility of a peaceful seizure of the
state power by the proletariat in England and America. Only
the whole speech is the whole Marx. In 1881, the year in
which Marx welcomed the Russian Terrorists 5 attempted
assassination of the Tsar, he said to Hyndman: Tf you say
that you do not share the views of my party for England I can
only reply that that party considers an English revolution not
necessary but — according to historic precedence — possible. If
the unavoidable evolution turns into a revolution, it would not
only be the fault of the ruling classes, but also of the working
class. Every pacific concession of the former has been wrung
from them by “pressure from without. 55 Their action kept
pace with that pressure and if the latter has more and more
weakened, it is only because the English working class know
not how to wield their power and use their liberties, both of
which they possess legally. In Germany the working class
were fully aware from the beginning of their movement that
you cannot get rid of a military despotism but by a revolution.
England is the one country in which a peaceful revolution is
"possible, but,’ he added after a pause, ‘history does not tell us
so. 5
Hyndman quoted this conversation correctly. Three years
after Marx’s death Engels wrote in the foreword to the English
translation of Das Kapital : ‘Surely, at such a moment the voice
ought to be heard of a man whose theory is the result of a life-
long study of the economic conditions of England, and whom
that study led to the conclusion that at least in Europe, England
is the only country where the inevitable social revolution might
be effected entirely by peaceful and legal means. He certainly
never forgot to add that he hardly expected the English ruling
classes to submit without a “pro-slavery rebellion 55 to this
peaceful and legal revolution. 5
THE LAST TEN YEARS
381
The proletariat would win, peacefully perhaps in the coun-
tries where there was an old and deeply rooted democracy, but
by force in those countries that were in the hands of aespotism.
When his daughter Jenny gave birth to a son in April, 1881,
Marx wrote to her: ‘My “womanly half” hopes that the “new-
comer” will increase the “better half” of humanity; so far as I
am concerned at this turning point in history* I favour children
of the masculine sex. They have before them tbe most revolu-
tionary period mankind has ever known. It is bad to be an
old man at this time, for an old man can only foresee instead of
seeing. 5 With this unflinching confidence Karl Marx died.
His was a painful dying but an easy death. Both his elder
daughters lived in France. Jenny was married to Charles
Longuet, Laura to Paul Lafargue. Eleanor, known to every-
one as Tussy, looked after her parents. Marx was ill and his
wife was wasting away with an incurable cancer. In summer,
1881, they visited Jenny Longuet at Argenteuil. Frau Marx
came back to London in a state of collapse, was confined to
bed and died on December 2, 1881. For a long time Marx
had known she was incurable, but her death was a heavy
blow. ‘The Moor has died too, 5 Engels said when he received
the news of Frau Marx’s death.
Marx was forbidden to attend the funeral, being bedridden
after an attack of pleurisy. As soon as he was well enough to
travel the doctors sent him to the south. At the end of
February, 1882, he went to Algiers but succumbed to pleurisy
again. An exceptionally cold winter and a wet spring aggra-
vated his condition. He went to Monte Carlo in the hope of
an improvement, but succumbed to pleurisy for the third time.
Not until he reached Argenteuil and later the Lake Geneva
did he recover sufficiently to be able to return to England.
London fog drove him to the Isle of Wight. He caught cold
again, had to keep to his room for a long time, tortured by a
cough and barely sleeping four hours a night.
Jenny Longuet died unexpectedly in Paris on January 11,
1883. Marx hurried back to London. He scarcely spoke
for days. He put up no more resistance to the advance of
illness. Laryngitis made it almost impossible for him to
swallow. Ij g diecL on. March 14, 1883, of a pulmonary abscess.
‘For the past six weeks, 5 Engels wrote to the faithful Sorge, ‘I
382 'KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
was in mortal terror as I turned the corner each morning lest
I should find the blinds pulled down. Yesterday afternoon at
half-past ^ wo, the best time of day for visiting him, I went
th,pre. The^whole house was in tears, it seemed to be the end.
I made inquiries^, tried to find out what was happening, to
console. There had been a slight hemorrhage, but then there
had been a sudd s qta collapse. Our excellent old Lenchen, who
had nursed him better than a mother, came down. He was half
asleep, and she said I could go up with her. When we entered
the room,, he lay there asleep, never to reawaken. His pulse
and breathing had stopped. In those two minutes he had
peacefully and painlessly passed away. 5
He was buried in the cemetery at Highgate on March 17.
Liebknecht spoke for the German workers, Lafargue for the
French woikers, Engels for the workers of the world.
His name, and his work, will re-echo down the centuries.
INDEX
Abd-el-Kadr, leader of rising in
Morocco against the French,
159
Adam, French Blanquist, 209
d’Agoult, Countess, French nove-
list (Daniel Stern), 72
Alexander II, Tsar, 315, 374
d’Allas Juin (‘Michelet’), French
revolutionary, 13 1
d’Alton Eduard, professor at Bonn
University, 17
Anneke, Fritz, former Prussian
officer, member of the Commun-
ist League in Cologne, 156, 157,
164, 171, 184, 193
Annenkov, Paul, Russian writer,
104, 1 18
Argyll, Earl Archibald, 22
Aristotle, 33
Arnim, Count von, student at
Bonn, 20
Arnim, Bettina von, German writer,
33, 96
Arnim, Graf Adolf Heinrich von,
Prussian minister, 82, 83
Auerbach, Berthold, German
writer, 48, 91
Auerswald, Rudolf, Prussian minis-
ter in 1838, 173
Babeuf, Gracchus, 79, 100
Bacon, Francis, 33, 246
Bangya, Colonel, Hungarian police
spy, 222
Bakunin, Michael, 67, 82, 113, 187,
279-97. 307-9. 313-14. 3 i6 »
321-4, 327-8, 342-5, 347-53,
363, 365
Barbas, Armand, French revolu-
tionary, 152
Barry, Maltman, English writer,
American delegate to First Inter-
national, 360
Barth^lemy, Emmanuel, Blanquist,
219
Bastelica, Andre, French Bakunin-
ist, 295
Bauer, Bruno, Germ/n philosopner
and writer, 34-41, 4/^, 50, 54,
62, 65, 67, 9j), 95, 1 01, 23.^
Bauer, Edgar, German journalist,
brother of Bruno, 40, 5 1 , 95
Bauer, Egbert, publisher, brother
of Bruno, 95
Bauer, Heinrich, shoem-’-jr, lead-
ing member of the Communist
League, 108, hi, 114, 138, 144,
151, 189, 206, 21 1, 217
Bebel, August, 303-4, 3 l 9 > 343~4»
3 6o > 365, 37 L 374-6
Becker, Hermann, German jour-
nalist, member of the Com-
munist League, 159, 175, 239,
254
Becker, J. P., leader of the First
International in Switzerland,
327, 363, 372
Beckwith, General, 21
Beesly, Professor Edward Spencer,
3I3. 339
Beresovsky, Anton, Polish revolu-
tionary, 315
Bernays, Lazarus Ferdinand Cales-
tin, German journalist, 70, 81—4
Bernhardi, German military his-
torian, 21
Bernstein, Eduard, German Social
Democrat, 90, 1 19, 356, 377, 0*79
Beust, Count, Austrian Chancellor,
335
Bismarck, Count Otto von, 258-9,
299> 300, 302, 304-5, 307, 31 1,
3 >4, 3i7, 320-1, 329, 334-6,
343, 354,. 372
Blanc, Louis, French Socialist, 68,
81, 86, 1 16, 286
Blank, Emil, brother-in-law of
Friedrich Engels, 152
Blanqui, Auguste, 79, 160, 209,
210, 214, 218-19, 265, 309, 366
Bloomfield, Lord, British Ambassa-
dor at Vienna, 335
Boisguilbert, Pierre le Pesant de,
French economist, 73
383
KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
384
Born, Stephan, writer, member of
Commu list League, later pro-
fessor at Bale, 133, 14 1, 155
Borne, Lt^^wig, German writer,
75. 87-8, 3P8
Burnstedt, AtZiLZ t von, German
writer, - publishc - of Deutsche
Briisselef'}Zeitung , police spy, 126-
7, ! 49, 15-J
Bornstein, Heinric.i, founder of
Paris Vorwart 3 , 81, 82, 84, 10 1
Brandenburg, Count Friedrich
Wilh^Jm, 179
Bricourt, Belgian deputy, 146
Brisbane, Albert, American news-
paper correspondent, Fourierist,
172, 233
Bourbaki, General, 319
Buonarotti, Franco-Italian revolu-
tionary, ^9, 100
Buret, Anton-Eug&ne, French
economist, 102
Burgers, Heinrich, German writer,
member of Communist League
in Cologne, 82, 84, 99, 165, 175,
241
Burns, Mary, wife of Friedrich
Engels, 239
Gabet, Etienne, French Utopian
Communist, 52, 67
Camphausen, Ludolf von, Liberal
politician, 1848, Prime Minister
of Prussia, 48, 50
Campbell of Orchard, Anne, Jenny
Marx’s grandmother, 22
G«rri£re, Professor Moritz, Left
Hegelian, 1 8 v
Cavour, Count, Italian statesman,
299 .
Channing, 233
Charles I, of England, 52, 83
Chenu, Adolf, 214
Cluseret, General Gustave Paul,
322, 323
Gluss, Adolf, member of Com-
munist League, 241
Cobbett, William, 102
Coenen, Philippe, Belgian Socialist,
member of First International,
334
Gonradi, Johann Jacob, brother-
in-law of Karl Marx, 7
Conskterant, Victor, French Uto-
pian Socialist, 52, 67, 142
Coullery, Dr. P., member of First
International in Switzerland,
278-9
Cowen, Joseph, English radical
politician, 378
D’Alton, Eduard, Professor at Bonn
University, 17
Dana, Charles Anderson, editor of
the New York Tribune , 233-5
Daniels, Dr. Roland, member of
Communist League in Cologne,
20,116,224,239,241
Danielson, Nicolaus, Russian econo-
mist, 374
Dante, 31
Darboy, Georges, Archbishop of
Paris, 330
Davoust, Marshal, 23
Delbruck, H., German historian,
21
Demuth, Helene, Karl Marx’s
housekeeper, 236, 240
D’Ester, Dr. Karl, German Demo-
cratic leader in Cologne, 1848-
9 , 97 , 193
Destutt de Tracy, French econo-
mist, 73
Dezamy, Theodor, French Utopian
Communist, 52
Diefenbach, no, 112
Dollcschall, Laurenz, censors the
Rheinische Zeitung, 55
Drigalski, Prussian General, 190
Dronke, Ernst, member of Com-
munist League, contributor to
Neue Rheinische £eitung, 82, 155,
166, 175
Duchatel, Charles, 1845, French
Minister of the Interior, 144
Duhring, Eugen, German econo-
mist, 371
Dupont, Eugene, worker, member
of General Council of the First
International, 312
Eccarius, J. Georg, tailor, General
Secretary of First International,
189, 206, 217, 264, 275, 355, 368
Eichhorn, Johann Albrecht Hein-
rich, Prussian minister, 45
INDEX
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 233
Engels, Friedrich, 11, 51, 53, 66,
82, 86-98, 101-13, 105, 107, HI,
1 15, 1 18, 121-6, 131, 133-6, 139,
147, 151-2, 155, 161-2, 166-7,
*69, 1 74~5> 189-90, 192, 197-8,
200-3, 205-7, 209, 212, 219, 223,
225-6, 228-9, 231-2, 235-6, 238-
41, 244-9, 251-4, 256-7, 261,
266, 270, 288, 296-7, 301-6, 310,
3 * 3 , 3 < 4 , 3*8-19, 325, 337 , 338,
353 - 4 , 356 , 359 , 361, 383, 365,
367, 37 °-*, 374 - 8 *
Esser, Prussian official in Trier,
later in Berlin, friend of Karl
Marx’s father, 65
Ewer heck, Dr. Hermann, member
of Communist League, 79, 80,
82, 1 14, 189, 192
Favre, Jules, French Foreign Minis-
ter, 335
Fenner von Fenneberg, Ferdinand,
student at Bonn, later Austrian
revolutionary, 18
Ferdinand of Brunswick, Duke, 20
Ferdinand of Naples, King (‘Bom-
ba’), 139
Feuerbach, Ludwig, German philo-
sophe-, 29, 63, 65, 67-8, 104, 107
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, German
philosopher, 25
Flocon, Ferdinand, editor of the
Paris RSforme , member of Pro-
visional Government, 1848, 143,
t52
Fourier, Charles, French Utopian
Socialist, 25, 78, 102, 233, 301
Frankel, Leo, Hungarian Smigrt,
member of Paris Commune,
327-9
Frederick the Great, King of
Prussia, 39
Frederick William III, King of
Prussia, 4, 10, 24
Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of
Prussia, 41, 43, 44, 54, 56, 61,
82, 83, 96, 99, 152, 220
Freiligrath, Ferdinand, German
poet, contributor to Neue Rhein -
ische ^eittmg, 87, 99, 100, 126,
176, 178, 196, 235, 241, 248,
303
25
385
Fribourg, S. C., work r, Proud-
honist, one of the founders ol
First International ir T aris, 269,
270, 272, 273
Fuller, Margaret ^ t
Frobel, Julius,, Geifaian radical,
publisher, Democr? *c Party
leader in 18/B, 63, 66, 67, 70
Funck-Brentan Professor, 3b8
Gall, Ludwig, German economist
and Utopian Socialist, 8
Gambetta, Leon, French salesman,
318-19
Gans, Eduard, Professor, Hegelian,
29-31.38,40,4*
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, Italian
national hero, 284-5, 317
Garnier-Pag£s, Louis Antoine,
French statesman, 15 1
Geibel, Emanuel, German poet, 18
Gerlach, Karl Friedrich von,
Cologne administrative official, 49
Gigot, Philippe, Belgian Com-
munist, 1 15, 1 1 8, 1 3 1, 145
Gladstone, William Ewart, English
statesman, 360
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 1
Goltz, von der, Count, student at
Bonn, 19
Gottschalk, Dr. Andreas, member
of Communist League at Cologne,
*55-6*, 1G3-4, 169-71, 176, 183-
5, *87-9, *92, 201, 206, 210, 293
Greeley, Horace, editor of New
York Tribune , 233, 235
Grun, Karl, German writer, ‘True*
Socialist, 18
Guesde, Jules, French Socialist,
377-8
Guillaume, James, Swiss Bakunin-
ist, 278, 290-2, 347, 359, 361-3
Guizot, Francois-Pierre-Guillaume,
French statesman, 66, 83
Hales, John, Secretary of General
Council of First International,
368
Handel, representative of Trier
nobility in Rhineland Diet, 9
Hansemann, David Ludwig, Rhine-
land Liberal, 1848, Prussian
Minister, 173
KARL MARX! MAN AND FIGHTER
386
Harney, • George Julian, Chartist
leader, ^3, 116, 130, 15 1, 209,
229, 230
Harrison, 1 "ederic, English Posi-
tivist, 339'
Hartman, Lto, Russian revolu-
tionary} 374
Hawthornt, Nathariel, 233
Hecker, attorm. r general in
Cologne, 190
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
German philosopher, 25, 30, 32-
3> 35 * 40, 46, 4^5 53> 65, 67,
68
Heilberg, Louis, member of Com-
munist League, imigrt in Brussels,
1 18, 130
Heine, Heinrich, German poet, 48,
67, 70, 72-3, 82, 86-7, 108, 126,
141
Heinzen, Karl, German Demo-
cratic writer, 133, 192
Herwegh, Georg, German poet,
54-6, 62, 67, 71-2, 82, 86, 99,
127-8, 149-52, 160, 192, 280,
327
Herwegh, Emma, wife of Georg
Herwegh, 71
Herzen, Alexander, Russian Radi-
cal, 199, 289, 346
Hess, Moses, German writer, a
‘True’ Socialist, 48, 50-1, 62, 91,
97, 107, 1 1 8, 134, 157, 293-4
Heyden, Count von, student at
Bonn, 19
Hildebrand, Hugo, Professor in
Vienna, 1 10-12
Hodde, Lucien de la, 214
Kofken, Dr. Gustav, German
writer, 49-50
Holbach, Baron, French philoso-
pher, 48
Hugo, Victor, French poet, 99, 284
Humboldt, Alexander von, Prus-
sian statesman and professor, 83,
99
Hyndman, Henry Myers, English
Socialist, 378-80
Imbert, Jacques, French Revolu-
tionary Blanquist, 132, 147
Ivanov, Ivan, student in Moscow,
348, 349. 353
James II, King of England, 22
John, King of Saxony, 31
Jones, Ernest Charles, Chartist
leader, 130, 151, 229-30
Jottrand, Lucien Leopold, Belgian
Democrat, 132, 145
Julius, Gustav, German writer,
Left Hegelian, 61
Jung, Georg Gottlieb, lawyer in
Cologne, Left Hegelian, 48, 50, 74
Jung, Hermann, watchmaker, mem-
ber of General Council of First
International, 368
Juta, Jan Karl, brother-in-law of
Marx, 7
Kaiser, J., Deputy to the Rhine-
land Diet, 9
Kamptz, Prussian Minister of Jus-
tice, 10
Kant, Immanuel, German philoso-
pher, 25
Katzenellenbogen, Rabbi Meir,
ancestor of Karl Marx, 4
Kautsky, Karl, German Social
Democrat, 301, 378
Koppen, Karl Friedrich, Left Hege-
lian, 34, 35, 39
Koscielski, Vladislav, Polish Demo-
crat, 173
Kossuth, Ludwig, Hungarian states-
man, 222, 227, 229
Kottgen, Gustav Adolph, German
painter, member of the Com-
munist League, 1 1 6
Kriege, Hermann, German writer,
member of the Communist
League, 12 1
Kugelmann, Ludwig, Doctor in
Hanover, member of First Inter-
national, 269, 273, 302-3, 314,
326, 329, 330, 333
Kyll, Cologne Democrat, 1848,
Deputy of the Berlin National
Assembly, 185
Lachatre, Morice, French Socialist
and publisher, 369
Lafargue, Laura, see Marx (La-
fargue), Laura
Lafargue, Paul, French Socialist,
Marx’s son-in-law, 14, 245, 255,
3 18, 363, 371, 377-8, 382
INDEX
Lamartine Alphonse de, French
poet and politician, 66, 148, 150,
153
Lamennais, Felicite Robert de, 66
Lassalle, Ferdinand, 19, 255-60,
276-7. 279. 302-4. 333. 375
Lavrov, Pierre, Russian Socialist
and philosopher, 324-5
Leach, James, Chartist in Man-
chester, 93
Lecomte, Claude- Martin, French
General, 330
Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre-Auguste,
leader of French Democrats,
*99
Lefort, Henri, French Republican,
member of First International,
270
Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, philo-
sopher, 33
Lelevel, Joachim, Polish historian
and Democrat, 132, 140
Le Lubez, French Republican, one
of the founders of First Inter-
national, 264, 266, 270
Leroux, Pierre, French Utopian
Socialist, 52, 67
Leske, Carl, Darmstadt publisher,
101
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Ger-
man poet, 48
Lessner, Friedrich, member of
Communist League and of
General Council of First Inter-
national, 245, 275, 355
Lewald, Fanny, German writer,
147
Liebermann, Prussian ambassador
in St. Petersburg, 56
Liebknecht, Wilhelm, one of the
founders of German Social Demo-
cratic Party, 40, 154, 215, 216,
218, 230, 243, 245, 303-5, 326,
342-4. 354. 360, 372-3, 375-7,
382
Liebknecht, Ernestine, nee Landolt,
first wife of Wilhelm Liebknecht,
64, 132, 244
Liebknecht, Natalie, nie Reh, second
wife of Wilhelm Liebknecht,
,37
List, Friedrich, German economist,
49
387
Liubavin, Russian Libf al, 350-1
363
Loers, Vitus, Trier s ti°°l mas t er >
14
Longuet, Char^ , j rench Pro’ !l-
honist, member 7 of ^ General
Council of 'First I T cernational
Karl Man f s * son-in-lav\, 65,
3 <> 9 > 3 * 9 * ‘
Longuet,Jenny,j?tfIylarx (Longuet),
Jenny *
Lopatin, Hermann, Russian re.volu-
tionary, 353
Louis Philippe, King of FruAce,
83, 141, 154
Lucas, Alphonse, French author,
151
Lucraft, Benjamin, member of
General Council of* First Inter-
national, 355
Lvov, Josua Heschel, Karl Marx’s
great-grandfather, 4
Lvov, Eva, Karl Marx’s grand-
mother, 4
M‘Culloch, John Ramsay, British
economist, 73
M’Grath, Philip, Chartist, 151
MacMahon, French General, 314
Malon, Benoit, French Socialist,
member of First International,
323 , 357 > 377 ) 379
Marx Levy, Karl Marx’s grand-
father, 4
Marx, Heinrich (Hirschel), Karl
Marx’s father, 4-5, 7-10, 14-
17-20, 24-5, 97, 41
Marx, Henriette, nie Pressbung,
Karl Marx’s mother, 6
Marx , Karl Heinrich, born, 6; goes
to school, 1 1 ; leaves school, 13:
at Bonn University, 16; secrel
engagement, 26; at Berlin Uni-
versity, 29; enters the ‘Doktor-
klub’ and meets Hegelians, 32
graduates at Jena, 42; his firsi
article for Rheinische fitting, 50
becomes editor of Rheinisck
Zeitung , 51; breaks with Berlir
‘Freien,’ 54; resigns editorship
following trouble with censor
59; Rheinische Z e ^ un S banned, 59
marries Jenny von Westphalen
388 (KARL MARX: MAN AND FIGHTER
Marx , Karf Heinrich — contd.
65; mc^vn to Paris, 66; Deutsch-
Franzo^v^he J ahrbucher, 69;
first chilL’*' born, 73; expelled
Jrom Paris,. - Qr >; in Brussels, 85;
CU^nmunist ^Correspondence com-
mittees,' 1 15; brd-iks with Wil-
helm Wei JingfU 1O7; joins Com-
munist League, '4; takes part
in Second Congress of Com-
munist League and, speaks at
meeting of Fraternal Democrats,
135^ r *”‘ f es Communist Mani-
“frsto, 136; expelled from Belgium,
144; arrives in Paris, 147;
Cologne, 155; dissolution of the
Communist League, 163; the
Neue Rheinische Zetiung^ 166;
becomes president of the Workers’
Union, 176; twice acquitted by
a Cologne jury, 192; resigns from
Democratic Union, 194; expelled
from Prussia, 196; last number
of Neue Rheinische Z eitun g> 196;
goes to Paris, 199; expelled from
Paris and moves to London, 203;
revival of Communist League,
205; works at British Museum,
2 1 1 ; split in Communist League,
218; Communist League for-
mally dissolved, 223; death of
Edgar Marx, Karl’s son, 245;
Critique of Political Economy com-
pleted, 248; foundation of First
International, 264; Das Kapxtal
completed, 2545(1 rst International
manifesto on Franco-Prussian
War, 304; second International
‘manifesto on Franco-Prussian
War, 310; The Civil War in
France , 330; General Council
of International transferred to
America at Hague Congress,
361; death of Jenny Marx, 381;
Karl Marx dies, 381.
Marx, Samuel, Karl’s uncle, 4
Marx, Sophie, Karl’s sister, 5, 24,
26, 27
Marx, Hermann, Karl’s brother,
6, 15
Marx, Henriette, Karl’s sister, 6-7
Marx, Louise, Karl’s sister, 6-7
Marx, Emilie, Karl’s sister, 6-7
Marx, Moritz-David, Karl’s
brother, 6
Marx, Karoline, Karl’s sister, 6-7
Marx, Edward, Karl’s brother, 6
Marx, Jenny, nee von West-
phalen, Karl’s wife, 21-8, 33, 41,
64-5, 132-3, 197, 201, 203, 222,
236, 240-4, 246, 251, 252
Marx (Longuet), Jenny, Karl’s
daughter, 11, 73, 244, 252-3,
374 , 381
Marx (Lafargue), Laura, Karl’s
daughter, 25, 65, 134, 244-5
Marx, Edgar, Karl’s son, 134, 244
Marx, Franziska, Karl’s daughter,
239
Marx, Eleanor, Karl’s daughter,
11, 72, 244, 371, 381
Mazzini, Giuseppe, Italian revolu-
tionary, 130, 229, 265-6, 271, 299
Mellinet, Antoine-Francois, Gen-
eral, Belgian Democrat, 132
Metternich, Prince von, Austrian
statesman, 16, 70, 153
Mcuron, Constant, worker, Swiss
Bakuninist, 291-2
Mevissen, Gustav von, Rhineland
Liberal, 48, 51
Meyer, Siegfried, German Socialist,
emigrt in America, 254
Meyerbeer, composer, 81
Michelet, see d’Allas, Juin
Mill, James, English philosopher
and economist, 73
Mill, John Stuart, English econo-
mist, 284
Miquel, Johannes, member of
Communist League, later Prus-
sian Minister, 318
Mohr, L., Deputy to Rhineland
Provincial Diet, 9
Moll, Joseph, watchmaker, Com-
munist League leader, 108, 111,
114, 123-4, i 3 6 » J 5 i> 1 7 1 > > 75 - 7 .
189-90, 192, 201, 205
Morosov, Nicolai, Russian revolu-
tionary, 374
Moscow, Prince of, son of Marshal
Ney, 153
Mottcrshead, Thomas, British trade
union leader, member of General
Council of First International,
368
INDEX
Napoleon I, 3, ,, ,
Napoleon III, 199, 218, 227, 249-
5L 263, 296, 299, 301-2, 304-12,
3 I 4~5> 3*7
Napoleon, Prince (‘Plon-Plon’),
262-3
Nechaiev, Sergei, Russian revolu-
tionary, 345-53, 363, 373
Negrescul, Michael, Russian revo-
lutionary, 351
Nesselrode, Count Carl Robert,
Rulfeian diplomat, 58
Nicholas I, Tsar, 56, 139, 169, 227
Nieuwenhuis, Ferdinand Domela,
Dutch Socialist, later anarchist,
327, 379
Nohl, police spy in Trier, 12, 19
Nothjung, Peter, tailor, member of
Communist League, 220
O’Connor, Feargus Edward, Char-
tist leader, 13 1
Odger, George, English trade union
leader, member of General Coun-
cil of First International, 317,
355
Ogarev, Nicol, Russian poet and
revolutionary, 316, 346, 349
Oppenheim, Dagobert, founder of
Rheinische Zeitung, 48, 50, 51, 53
Oswald, F., see Friedrich Engels
Owen, Robert, English economist
and Utopian Socialist, 25, 78, 93,
102, 265
Oxenbein, Colonel, Swiss revolu-
tionary, 138
Ozerov, Vladimir, Russian Bakunin-
ist, 327
de Paepe, Cesar, Belgian Socialist,
274, 300
Palmerston, Lord, 231-2, 263
Pecchio, Giuseppe, Italian econo-
mist, 102
Petty, William, English economist,
102
Pfander, Karl, artist, member of
the Communist League and later
of General Council of First Inter-
national, 206, 217
Pfuel, Ernst, Prussian general, 1 74,
179
389
Philips, August, cous n of Karl
Marx, lawyer in Vrasterdam
369 . . - r
Philips, Lion, mercha *■ in Holland,
uncle of Karl M* x, 252
Pindy, French ninist, 29 r , 309
Polykarp, Ru: iian bishop, 203
Propertius, 17
Proudhon, Je 1 Baptist, 52, 67, 81,
,0 4“f» 1 '5 16, 128, 239, 265,
267, 272-6, 299, 301, 365
Pyat, Felix, French poet and revo
lutionary, 315, 316. 32.,, 325,
328
Ranvicr, French Blanquist, me u-
ber of General Council of First
International, 354
Raveaux, Franz, Cologne Demo-
crat, 163-4, ! &4
Reclus, Jean Jacques Elisee, French
geographer, anarchist, 369
Reclus, Elie, brother of Elisee,
French author, 369
Riazanov, David, Russian his-
torian, 103
Ricardo, David, English econo-
mist, 73
Richard, Albert, French Bakunin-
ist in Lyons, 295, 349
Ripley, George, Publisher of the
New York Tribune , 233
Robespierre, Maximilian, 315
Rochefort, Comte Henry de, French
writer, 295
Rogier, Charles Latons, Belgian
Foreign Minister, 142
Roser, Peter Gerhard, member of
Communist League, 216
Rossi, Pellegrino, Italian econo-
mist, 102
Rothacker, Wilhelm, Baden Demo-
crat, Emigre, 239
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, French
philosopher, 13, 48
Roy, J., French translator of Das
Kapital , 369
Ruge, Arnold, German Left Hege-
lian, radical, politician, and
writer, 46-7, 50-1, 53, 61-7, 69-
72, 80, 82, 84, 10 1, 235
Rumigny, General, French ambas-
sador in Belgium, 142
390 CARL MARX! MAN AND TIGHTER
lviistow, Pr ssian officer and revo-
lutionaiv, 327
Rkitenberg, Adolph, German
T Titer, Y ng Hegelian, 34-5,
f 7-40, 50, 5.
Saint-1 aul, Wilhelm, censors the
Rheinische eitun\ { 7
Saint-Simon, Comte ienri Claude,
French Utopian Socialist, 8, 25,
. 7?
Cavigny, Friedrich Karl, Professor
in Purlin, Prussian Minister, 29,
' 44
Say, Jean Baptist, French econo-
mist, 73
Schapper, Karl, Communist League
leader, 77, 108-14, 116-17, 122-3,
I 3°“ 1 > x 34 *3 6 > x 44> l 5 l > 1 55>
*63, l 7 h ns - 6 * l8o > i 8 5> i 8 9~
90, 193, 206, 217, 222
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm, Ger-
man philosopher, 44
Schiller, Ernst von, lawyer in
Trier, son of Friedrich Schiller, 7
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von,
Professor in Bonn, 17
Schleiermacher, F riedrich-Daniel-
Ernst, theologian, 89
Schlink, J. Heinrich, Saarbriicken
official, 64
Schnabel, Trier police spy, 12
Schneider, Karl, Cologne lawyer,
Democrat, 171, 180, 184-85
Schramm, Rudolph, Cologne
Democrat, 49
Schramm, Konrad, member of
Communist League, 237
von der Schulenberg, Bonn student,
19
Schurz, Karl, Bonn Democrat,
later American statesman, 172,
21 1
Scott, Winfield, American Federal
General, 235
Seiler, Sebastian, member of Com-
munist League, 118, 150
Senior, Nassau William, English
economist, 102
Serraillier, August, French Socialist
member of General Council of
First International, 316, 328
Shakespeare, 244
Simon, Jules, French statesman,
35 8
Sismondi, Jean Charles Simon de,
French economist, 102
Skarbeck, Frederic, Polish-French
economist, 73
Smith, Adam, English economist,
73
Sorge, Friedrich Albert, German
tmigrt, member of General Coun-
cil of First International in
America, 325, 357, 361, 363,
368, 381
Spinoza, Benedictus, 33
Stahl, Julius, Berlin Professor, 41
Stefiens, Hendric, Berlin Professor,
29, 3i
Steiniger, Johann, Trier school-
master, 13
Stieldorf, Major, pro-Belgian agita-
tor, 18
Stirner, Max (Kaspar Schmidt),
Left Hegelian, 62, 103
Strauss, David Friedrich, Theolo-
gian, 36
Taylor, Bayard, American writer,
248
Thiers, Louis Adolf, French states-
man, 330
Thomas, Clement, French General,
330
Thompson, Thomas Perronet, Eng-
lish politician and economist, 102
Tolain, Henri Louis, engraver,
Proudhonist, one of the founders
of First International, 269, 270
Tooke, Thomas, English economist,
102
Tucker, E., London publisher, 232
Turgeniev, Ivan, Russian author,
54
Tussy, see Marx, Eleanor
Ure, Andrew, British economist,
102
Urquhart, David, British politician
and writer, 231-2
Utin, Nicolai, Russian imigri , mem-
ber of First International, 353
Vaillant, Eduard, French Blan-
quist, 354, 361
INDEX
Valdenaire,\\fcctor, Landed pro-
prietor in Trier, Deputy of the
Rhineland Provincial Diet, 9
Varlin, Eugene, French Inter-
nationalist, member of the Paris
Commune, 273, 295, 322-5,
328
Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August,
Prussian statesman and writer,
4 1
Veltheim, Elisabeth von — see West-
phalen Elisabeth von
Vermersch, French writer, emi-
grant 1871, 354
Vesinier, Pierre, French journalist,
member of First International,
3 i 5 . 328
Victoria, Queen, 221, 289
Vidil, Jules, French Blanquist,
dmigrd in London, 209
Villetard, E., French Reactionary,
historian of First International,
276
Vogt, Gustav, Berne Professor, one
of the founders of ‘League of
Peace and Freedom,’ 289
Vogt, Karl, Geneva Professor,
Democrat, 250, 251
Voltaire, Francois Marie de, 48
Wagner, Richard, German com-
poser, 1848-9, revolutionary, 195,
291
Wallau, Karl, German worker,
member of Communist League,
I5L 155
Weber, Dr. Georg, of Kiel, member
of Communist League, 82, 1 16
Weerth, Georg, German poet,
member of Communist League,
78, 82, 157, 165-6, 175, 223, 241
293
Weitling, Wilhelm, Communist,
76-7, 80-1, 107-9, 1 13-14, 1 iT-
21, 128, 130, 133, 171, 187-8,
201, 206, 281
Welcker, Friedrich Gottlieb, Bonn
Professor, 17
Welcker, Karl Theodor, leader of
Baden Liberals, 45
391
Westphalen, Jenny vor see Marx,.
Jenny
Westphalen, Ludwig \on, Fra x
Marx’s father, 22, ' -7, 65
Westphalen, Philip Frau Marx’s
grandfather, zi
Westphalen, Elisabeth, nL von
Veltheim, f rs* wif of Ludwig
von Westpl f jn, 24
Westphalen, Karo 1 me, nSe Heubel,
second wife of Ludwig von
Westphalen, mother of Frau
Marx, 24
Westphalen, Edgar von, broths '
Frau Marx, 5, 24, 118, 132, 133
Westphalen, Ferdinand von, 1 v'J-
brother of Frau Marx, Prussian
Minister, 23, 28, 65, 125
Weydemeyer, Joseph, member of
Communist League, 118, 132,
202, 224-5, 236, 238-9, 241, 247,
261
William I, Emperor of Germany*
256
Willich, Lieutenant August von,
Prussian revolutionary, member
of Communist League, 155-8,
164, 187, 201, 205-6, 209, 213-
22, 229, 247, 281, 293, 332
Wishart of Pitarrow, Jeanie, grand-
mother of Frau Marx, 21, 22
Wishart, William, great-grand-
father of Frau Marx, 22
Wolff, Ferdinand, member of
Communist League, on editorial
board of Neue Rheinische
166, 175
Wolff, Luigi, ITazzini’s secretary,
member of First International,
265
Wolff, Wilhelm, (‘Lupus’), mem-
ber of Communist League, 124,
129, 140, 143, 151, 155, 166, 175,
190, 193, 241, 253
Wrangel, Baron, 336
Wyttenbach, Johann Hugo, Trier
headmaster, 12, 13, 14
Zweiffel, high official in Cologne*
190
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